Hi Black Cat, It's no consolation, but you're not alone. Yesterday I tried several times to render a very simple scene: Michael w/hair, no clothing (was using one of sturk's hero MATs), standing in a small room, default lighting. In production mode, even with most options dialed down, it was incredibly slow. I never did get my render because after 40 minutes I lost patience and canceled out. My system is a P4 2.4ghz, 1GB RDRAM, etc. I was thinking that it was just me, and that I was obviously doing something wrong. But from your post I'm thinking maybe the firefly renderer is just very, very slow. I'm not going to cast judgement and slam the program, its way too premature for that and wouldn't be fair. But... I do know that I will be using the P4 renderer for a little while longer until I figure out what I'm doing. Matt