nomuse, Yes, I caught your drift in that direction above in post19. You are onto a good idea if you can find where to control it. Meanwhile, I tried a few 'overall' attempts in that same vein. The first day I worked on this issue I used all shadow buffer lights. I couldn't get good results. Yesterday I switched to all raytrace, but for a while i tried to work with one shadow buffer light on top of the the other raytrace lights, just so I could get a blur slider. I guess I was thinking the same as you! However, it blew out the fine resolution of the strands in general and threw off the specular. See, this is no easy thing....one wants the realism of thousands of finely definded hairs, and even shadows under the strands (you don't really see them, but they are there) and that's why in poser you achieve the effect with very tight anti-alias (min shading rate) and small bias on depth map shadows with big maps. The other element that shouts realism is when a few wispy strands or very thin groups hang down into the air or against a neck...and you see the very tip resolve to an extremely thin point, like to one pixel. As you can see in my last example above, you can almost get there in Carrara by staying in raytrace and cranking all the settings way up, and I bet with another two days or so the proper combination of controls and settings could yeild an artistic equivelent. However, the render time....blown. There still might be a low rendertime solution in Carrara. I am chiefely handicapped by lack of my own time to pursue it, and my inexperience with the program. I can think of half-a-dozen ideas to attempt, such as moving lights in or out, going down to two lights with shadows, going back to all shadow buffer, exploring shader nodes, etc.. Please let us know what you find out. ::::: Opera :::::