I'll start by saying I'm unfamiliar with 3d. We are currently in the market for a 3d terrain program so I downloaded the trial version of 4 pro and have found it to be easy to use. No one in our office has any 3d experience, so easy to use is nice. What I'm curious about is what I can expect for render times. Rarely will an animation be over 30 seconds and most likely around 10 -15 seconds. The trial version has a 5 sec max for ouput and I'm having render times of 6+ hours for a scene with 1 rock, 1 tree, 1 water layer, 1 terrian and 1 cloud layer. That's with the output set at broadcast quality 640x480 without alphas. I have it running on mac g5 dual 2 with 4 gigs of ram. This long render time scares me because in 2 months we will be working in an HD work flow so our animations will have to be 1920x1080. What can I do to improve render times?