Don't know what's up with this, i can render v4 with AO and ray tracing...in under 2 minuets. great quality renders... as soon as I put hair on her... I'll see my render times triple in some cases.. so if i have 3 or 4 charecters in scene with hair... it just takes way too long to render..

I really would like to fix this.. it's either the transparency that slows it down or the complicated geometry. I've got some hair models that have as many polygons as victoria...

so my question is 2 parts...

a) is there a free.. or close to free utility that can reduce the number of poly for an poser object file.. from say 60,000. polygons to about 20,000. I don't need higres hair when doing a distance shot.

b) will reducing the size of the tranparncy maps make any differnce in render times?

Thanks in advance for your help..

System
AMD X2 4200
2 gig mem
Poser 7
Win XP and Vista

It's the transparency. If you turn off the "Visible in raytracing" option for the hair, render times will be fast again. You'll lose raytraced shadows and AO from the hair, though.
Depending on the scene, you could leave that be, or use some depth mapped shadows for the hair objects.

Thought it might have been the transparency.

Too bad there is no quality setting for transparency...or is there?? will scale down transparency maps..maybe play with settings.  

is there away to set antialsing properties per object?