After fighting a lost battle with Poser's lights in a dimly lit scene, I decided it was time to try rendering in Carrara 5 Pro instead. I thought there might be some interest in the results. After I set up an illustration for Sue's Katana ('nother thread), I opened C5P to check out the alternatives. First I loaded the Jessie in what is called "native format." Jessie came in Ok, but the sword lost all it's parameter settings. And on closer examination, Jessie had an eyelash problem (no transparency). The lights didn't look "right" (it's hard to think of Poser lights as "right"...), and the camera didn't import, so I had to set up the camera position again. I wrestled with Shaders for ten minutes trying to get the eyelash transparency to work. No luck. I'm sure the problem was my grasp of C5P shaders, but there you are. I closed the file and opened it again with the Transposer importer. Oh my. Everything was exactly where it should be (except, again, the camera, which went missing), morphed and lit and transparent. There are two odd compatibility issues. The lights don't work the same way, so I had to adjust them (down about 80%) to get the effect I had in the original. And the cameras interpret focal length a bit differently, so that the picture I got from a 50mm camera in P6 was a bit fish-eyed compared to the 50mm image in C5P. The real surprise was to come. The scene took roughly five seconds to render. That's "seconds." And area renders were virtually instantaneous. That's "no seconds." It took P6 five minutes to render the same scene on the same computer. In my opinion, the C5P image is better than the P6 one, speed aside. The only problems are the reflection maps on the blade, which I'm not satisfied with in either image, and the differences between the light and camera settings. Clearly, there has to be some tweaking in C5. But the lights are more feature-rich, and the 60-fold speed difference is pretty compelling. I don't think I'll be doing production renders in P6 any more. Which means I can stop taking the blood pressure medication.... Now to try that scene I wasted two days trying to light in Poser.