This is a different approach attempting to get Poser dynamic hair into Carrara and achieve the same quality, and also maintain quality of realism on closeups.

Baseline image:
Poser 6, dynamic hair, non-raytraced shadows from three spotlights.
Rendertime: 6 min, 35 seconds

When you import into Carrara thru Transporter, the dynamic hair comes along. But it is problematic to get it back to the fine resolution you can achieve in Poser. My first trial was instinctively to change the raytrace lights over to shadow buffer (they default in as raytrace). I spent more than a day attempting to get Carrara shadow buffer lights to get to a great render, but was not successful. This does not mean it can't be done.

Yesterday, i decided to try a different scheme: stay with raytrace. Without changing anything else, I got a REALLY FAST render, 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Here is the render:

The problem: the hair is not resolved to the fineness I want, and of course the shadows are not soft and beautiful.

In the next render, I kicked up the anti-alias, object accuracy and shadow accuracy settings to good/1/1 and turned "Full Raytracing" on for two lights. Render time 5 minutes, six seconds.

Finally, here is a render with raytrace settings pretty well jacked up all the way. Render time 19 minutes, 47 seconds. It is much closer.

It looks like I could get the hair to get close to Poser's. I'd still have to solve the issue of beautiful soft shadows and to get shaders to produce realistic skin and SSS in Carrara; the shaders did not come over from poser.

::::: Opera :::::