There is a way to create a mane and tail that's not terribly difficult from the modelling standpoint. I've only done a small amount of experimentation with it myself, but I believe it's worth the time to develop. Remove the mane and tail, and create a patch surface to fill the missing polys. For the tail of the standard Poser horse, this gives you 66 polys to work with,...the mane would be several hundred. The polys are then shifted inward,...maybe 2% or so. This gives you 66 polys that don't share common edges, so they can be extruded individually along a path. This way, you can create a mane/tail of just about any shape or complexity (depending on the subdivision of the extrusion it can be hundreds or thousands of polys). When that's done, you can divide the resulting geometry into sections to allow for various manipulations in Poser. The one model I tried this on was a female with very long hair, which was rendered in Bryce. A thinly stranded transparency map was applied using the "reflection map" setting, and I was fairly pleased with the results,...although rendering multiple layers of transparency kicked render time through the roof. Anyway, as I said, it was just a single experiment, but I think it has considerable potential.