fully render a scene in draft mode? It takes me, without a background, a good 15 minutes to render a scene... Then i make a 60 frame movie, and it'll take me 15 hours just to render a small 1 and a half second movie... What about everyone else?

Are you talking about Poser 5 - Firefly, Poser 5 - Poser 4 Render, or Poser 4 Render? Kind of makes a difference. With Poser 5 - Firefly, it usually takes me a few minutes (2-5) to render a scene, but I don't have much complexity to my graphics, and I'm not trying to do animation. What bogs me down is dynamic hair and multiple lights with shadow maps (I often render drafts without shadows for that reason), and rendering to a new window (staying in the same window for drafts always seems faster to me). I'm sure everyone will have a different story to tell, and probably more expertise to share.

oops... Poser 5 - Firefly

I admire your patience, by the way.

So much depends on the complexity of the scene. P5 hair is slower as are the atmospheric effects. Depth of Field effects also seem to slow the render. The same is true in any application... the more complicated the scene, the longer the render. I've done some movie stuff in the past with P4. It was taking about 3 hours to render 30 seconds of frames at 15 fps. That was with one character, a simple costume and simple hair. Experiment with simplifying your scene first if you're really into rendering animations.

This is where having a second PC you can devote souly to rendering comes in handy. Unfortunately, since I lack that, I just don't start an animation render until last thing before I go to bed, and let the thing run all night. I've ran an animation render for three days straight once- I can say from experience that I don't recommend using dynamic hair in lengthy animations unless there's no alternative. Stick with P4 hair and magnets if there's any chance to get the same effect that way.

This one took only a few minutes in production mode, at 1200x1600, with a couple of background props, transmapped hair, shadow maps, raytraced reflections, and polygon smoothing enabled.

I'm running on an Athlon XP 2000+ with 512MB of memory, incidentally.

Jenny Curtis Scott Kellogg, 21st Century Fox

there's the difference...i have an Intel Pentium 3