I am engaged in a healthy discussion here on the OpenGl and slider abilites of Carrara....this is a different topic: Comparing high quality Poser6 realism to Carrara's. The attached image is my baseline. It was rendered in Poser 6. I am gradually learning how to set lights and render settings in Carrara, but it will take me days and days of work to emulate the Poser baseline render. Meanwhile, the renders I AM getting out of Carrara are beautiful, but with very high render times. My goal is to determine if, quality for quality, I can get a significant render speed increase for this type of image in Carrarra over Poser6. I am hoping to suplement my own investigations with help from Carrara veterans, either by ancedotal tales or attempts to replicate this baseline. I might spend days and days, but still not arrive at the settings a good Carrara guru would know in an instant are optimal and fast. Here are the elements in the baseline: RENDER SIZE: 640x480 James Casual James_Messy strand hair (dynamic) Lights: (3) Main infinite; DepthMapShadows Blurr:5 Bias:.01 Map:1024 Intensity: 77 Light2Fill Spot, no shadows intensity 66 Light3Back Spot, no shadows intensity 53 (behind the right ear) Render settings: Engine: FireFly RENDER SIZE: 640x480 Raytrace on (For fastscatter Shader) bounces = 2 Hair invisible to raytrace, and not casting shadows Min shading Rate: 1.0 Pixel Samples: 3 THERE IS NO IBL OR AO, just tight depth map shadows. Shaders: face_off skin realism package, fastscatter engaged. Hardware: AMD 3500+, 4GRam, XPPro, RaptorHD, NVIDIA GeForce 5600, 256MB Render time: 80 seconds. Can anyone either attempt to replicate this render, or at least state whether Carrara can achieve something very close at a lesser rendertime? Thank you, ::::: Opera :::::