The only things in the scene are what I mentioned in my post. The render style is set to nothing, since anti alias is off completely (I turned it off to see if it would speed things up. It didn't). I'll check on the true ambience thing, but the sky is the plain black BG preset. I can't imagine anything simpler. I have one body texture with eyelash trasparency, a seperate texture for the irises, and one hair texture with transparency. That's it for textures and transparencies. I cannot imagine what is slowing this down so much unless it is the hair mesh itself. It's Anton's Victoria's Changing POny tail, with the curly tail, and two spawn props of the tail bit stuck on either side so she's got a mop of golden curly Q hair. I've seen renders with Much MUch more involved than I have. I can't imagine what it must have been like to set them up if what I am experincing is normal. I haven't even fixed the lighting yet. I'm just trying to set materials so far, but I can't do that very well if I can't see the results of my efforts.