I have to fold my cards for now. No matter what settings I give for any sort of GI, including just AO, the dynamic hair completely ruins my render time. Following Ringo's suggestion, I changed the shadows to "shadow buffer" and made sure all GI was shut down. I was able to move up and down in quality and get James+Messy to render, but anything in the neighborhood of my baseline 80 seconds was not as good as my Poser render. I am confident that if I committed to Carrara, learned shadow buffer and other lighting tricks, plus then learned SSS on skin, etc., I might be able to get back to same quality at same render time. However, there is no windfall to be had. That is because of my need for dynamic hair, for realism in animation. I accept responsibility for that choice, and there is no free lunch, as the director of FF learned trying to deal with 50,000 strand shoulder length hair for 100 minutes. I have to return to consideration of my render budget, and find more seconds in it, perhaps as many as 400. At that point, I'll return to Carrara and look in again. Thank you, ::::: Opera :::::