Apologies .. I didn't go into much detail as I didn't want to appear to be advertising in the main forum. But to clarify .. I was talking about posing time. It renders in P4 in less than a minute on my machine (2.8ghtz cpu, 1gig ram) and a few seconds longer using the P4 render engine in P5. Firefly renders, of course, take longer depending on your settings. The pose on the left took so long partly because I'm slow, but also because it was posed by hand. The ones on the right were posed using IK. It's a tough old bird to pose by hand because of the number of jointed parts, which are necessary to get those smooth curves. The poly count is ok .. it's all the rigging (IK chains, bulges, and some overlapping geometry) that makes it slow to load in P5 (P4 doesn't care and loads it in a few seconds). Anyway, SnowSultan hit the nail on the head "it's pretty revolutionary if you can render hair that looks like it's postworked". That was always the aim. You just made my day! I'll post one more pic below, since it shows the hair separated out a bit more. The full blown version of the model has 42 individually poseable sections in the tail. Each consists of 18 jointed actors. There are no 'movement morphs'. Thanks for all the positive responses.