I used to run into this problem all of the time.

I enjoy creating complex scenes with lots of background items, and several characters.

Unfortunately, with P5 renders this can prove to be somewhat problematic. P5 will regularly choke (hang up) on complex renders.

As has been mentioned already, this difficulty occasionally stems from a particular memory-eating object in the scene....such as a hair object. Delete that object, and the problem usually goes away. Unfortunately, this means that you can't use that particular object in your scene.

You can try setting the Bucket Size in your render options dialog box to a lower number. I think that the default size is 32. Keep in mind that lowering the Bucket Size can greatly increase the amount of time required for a render. And it might not even work.

However -- this is my real recommendation. If you don't have it, then get Vue 5, or the soon-to-come Vue Infinite.

I used to constantly deal with the frustration of P5's rendering limitations on complex scenes. All of the time.

So......I switched to Vue. Now, I do almost all of my rendering in Vue. It's not only faster by several orders of magnitude -- but it doesn't "freeze" in the middle of a render after waiting 15 min. to see if it'll work.

Man, was that annoying. And it's a major reason why I now render my P5 scenes in Vue.

In addition to which: Vue is a great software package in its own right.

Something To Do At 3:00AM