As far as "How" I do such things: First off, I never use a texture over 1024 square, for anything, unless the area of the texture is going to ocupy a greater portion of the scene. Secondly, I never have anything in a scene that isn't going to be rendered. Body parts, surface area, morphs, textures, whatever -- if I'm not going to see it through the lens, I don't load it. My main system is set up with a swap file of 3GB, which is housed on a secondary drive -- separate both from my actual runtime and from windows itself. In some cases, I have nothing but poser running -- particularly int he larger renders. I also pay attention to how poser works, and how my particular system runs in the process. I've done large renders in Poser 4, as well (though not as cool imho) -- I just set them up that way. Without fail the things that affect my ability to render large, complex scenes in poser 5 or 6 are that anything I used to do in Poser 4 will basically make things worse. Larger textures for clearer impact? nope -- sucks. Smaller textures and spending literally hours reading the math heads talk about nodes and then pouring over maya forums and other engines to cull data about shader set ups they use. Basically, it comes down to knowing my tool. And my tool is a complete computer, not just a program, and one thing I learned when I had my system company was build the system to the task its for -- and I built this nasty (and, at this moment, dead) system specifically to poser.

thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us, one non-flunkey, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with. (Carlyle)