I hope someone can advise me.  Poser dynamic hair strikes me as something that looks really great theory wise but doesn't seem practical especially in animations due to the looooooong time needed to calculate it.  I read somewhere that Carrara can calculate Poser dynamic hair faster than Poser proper.  Is this true?  If not has anyone found any techniques to do the hair calcs faster?

 Carrara has its own dynamic hair and fur system, very fast and realistic.
Carrara is a very good software.

Actually the hair system in Carrara is better in many aspects than Poser. But it isn't really much faster, given the same quality of hair. Often you will find that you can get away with a somewhat lower quality setting and thus gain some time.

The one thing missing in Carrara is the cloth system which isn't easy to export from Poser.

The hair in Carrara does take a long time to calculate (slightly faster, but not much, than poser). There are a few tricks to speed it up.
If your character has only one side to the camera, you can delete the unseen hair.
The number of segments per hair can be drastically reduced.
You can place fewer, but thicker hairs on the head, this is okay for distance, but not close up renders.
You can use a prop hair and place a few animated hair strands on to it. This way you have a good head of hair, but can still animate some whispy bits.

Quote - You can use a prop hair and place a few animated hair strands on to it. This way you have a good head of hair, but can still animate some whispy bits.

Why did I never think of this before?  And here I was killing my wrist by painting!

Sueposer, you're awesome.

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The one thing missing in Carrara is the cloth system which isn't easy to export from Poser.

There is a tutorial over at DAZ that shows an easy way of exporting Poser cloth for use in D/S and it works in Carrara as well. I use this technique all the time and it couldn't be any easier.

http://www.daz3d.com/i/tutorial/tutorial?id=1543&_m=d