Well, I have to have dynamic hair for my animations, that is certain. And yes, it IS the strand hair that is slowing down Carrara. I have not been able to get a render time under 12 minutes yet and several were over 20. But I'm not giving up by any means. I'll be putting in another session tonight attempting to get a good realism close-up render with strand hair in Carrara. In Poser, you have to make strand hair invisible to raytrace or you will be there for an hour. Luckily, you can do that just for the hair, letting raytrace/fastscatter go to work on the skin. So, I've got to turn raytrace off in Carrra, and look for another avenue to GI and realism/great shadows. ::::: Opera :::::