Hello World! I am another Poser vet peeking in here. I spent an hour searching and reading threads first, but I admit I might be asking things covered elsewhere, for that I beg forgiveness. Respectfully I ask, no modelling arguments. This is about rendering. Thank you. The specs for moving Poser assets into Carrara5Pro look highly appetizing, but it's only worth it to me if I get a real boost in render speed and solid render farm implementation. This would be for animated scenes where skin realism, convincing hair and cloth dynamics, and global illumination/soft shadows are the emphasis. (Not landscapes, vegitation, architecture, flyovers, etc.) Please cut and paste for animation. 5MB Quicktime. http://jrdonohue.com/blurr.mov Both Poser and Carrara have these tools. I am making great progress in Poser6, but to get realism with two characters, dynamic hair and clothes and GI, I am at approximately 600 seconds per frame at 720x540. I have been gradually whittling that down from 12-15 mintues per frame through texture simplification and lighting optimization and shaders. 1) everyone says the Carrara render engine is faster. Is it, REALLY? I am trying to discover: If I work my way up the CarraraPro learning curve, especially with skin realism including SSS, GI and cloth/hair dynamics, will I realize a twice-as-fast gain in render time in Carrara? Or just a fraction? 2) the render farm: seems it sends one frame at a time to the nodes, with different CPUs rendering different tiles on it, then all cpus wait until slowest one gets done. Can it instead be instructed to send separate FRAMES to separate cpus and no waiting? 3) how many nodes of render farm do you get with one license of Carrara Pro 5? 4) does Carrara have procedural shaders like Poser6? If I can penetrate the Carrara world a little more by reading, viewing gallery images and posting, I'll download the Pro demo. Thank you, ::::: Opera :::::