"But is it POSER strand hair specifically? Is there something intrinsically burdensome with Poser hair? Or is it simply, and understandably, dynamic/strand hair in general that impacts render time, especially under raytrace?" Operaguy, the problem is specifically Poser hair. Sort of. Here's what I mean: Poser hair is basically splines that are interpolated from "guide" splines at rendertime by Poser. Storing and manipulating millions of dynamic spline hairs is VERY demanding on today's technology. Therefore, just as standard 3D graphics uses boundaries such as "surfaces" to describe solid objects, dynamic hair uses guides to describe the basic shape and behavior of the splines. It's designed specifically so that rendering the dynamic hair WITHIN POSER is not something that typically boggs down your system to the point that it's unusable. Now, when you export a PZ3 containing dynamic hair to another application, the hair is not interpreted by the native renderer as efficiently as it is in Poser's native renderer, so you ends up putting more strain on the render engine, and slowing down the render in general. Applications that have their own version of dynamic hair (like Maya, 3dsmax, Cinema4D, Lightwave, and others) all use features that make the process much more efficient WITHIN that application. Otherwise, if you were rendering thousands of splines as simple geometry that ANY 3D app can read and utilize the same, then you'd have mostly unusable hair that boggs down just about any system. Each application must interpolate the hair using it's own unique method, or else it's not going to be very efficient. See what I'm saying?