Unfortunately, Poser has short-shrift limitations on just how many figures & props it'll tolerate in a scene before the render engine locks up & refuses to go any further. It's a source of great irritation that sometimes it only takes as few as 3 V3's to give the render engine fits. Even on high-end PC's. And, yes, morph-laden figures and hair can drag your system down to a crawl.

I assume that you are having rendering problems. If so, then here are a few options:

1. Depending upon the number of the figures in any given scene, save several copies of your file. Keep a copy or two of the complete file as it is -- for backup purposes. Then open up the file copies, and delete different figure(s) from each copy. Render the partial scenes that you've thus created separately, using exactly the same render settings on each one. Then, merge the partial renders together in Photoshop (or another photo-manipulating program) to get the "final render" that you wanted.

This method will not work well with all scenes, depending upon how your characters are posed in relation to one another. You might want to try deleteing one character from one file, while leaving two characters together in another file. It's easy to split the scene right down the middle, and then combine the two rendered halves together in Photoshop.

This method also has the effect of creating smaller files sizes, and thus less demands on system resources. And thus more speed.

BTW - currently, this is the main method that I use with complex Poser scenes.

2. As you yourself have suggested, Vue is an excellent option. Just keep in mind that Vue doesn't handle skin tones very well on its on -- however, there is a recently released shader product called SkinVue that can help with this. You can take a look at it over at 3DCommune.

Otherwise, it's a snap to import Poser scenes into Vue. Easy as pie.

3. Try the standard "tricks" for rendering -- under Render Settings, reduce the bucket size/lower the texture load size to a smaller number. You can also reduce the size of the render itself under "Render Dimensions" on the menu. That sometimes helps, too.

Something To Do At 3:00AM