a few notes: using magenta as a transparency color You don't need to use a transparency color. If you save your file as PSD or TIFF, poser saves an alpha channel to the file. Are your figures wearing clothes? Hide every body part that's hidden by clothing, that'll save you both memory and render time. As others said, substituting hi-res figures with low-rew ones for the background is also a good idea. If you have decent textures on them, they'll still look very good. Finally, some more info about your rendering settings and the computer you're using couldn't hurt. It sounds to me like you're possibly running out of memory, or going beyond the limits of RAM that Windows can handle per app. If you open the task manager, what does it say about Poser's RAM usage?