AgentSmith said:"Morgano, out of curiosity, you last paragraph there; "a scene that Poser 6 could render satisfactorily gobbled up 1.5Gb of memory just in the course of being imported to Carrara"

Do you believe it was due to textures? I aks becuase Bryce has that problem with image textures, they bloat up memory usage.

I saw this on the Eovia website about the current update to Carrara 5.1;

Render and use images with very high definition textures even if it does not fit in memory (RAM). As long as you have enough disk space, the texture will still render!"

Textures could be the key.   I'll investigate.   Many thanks.    (By the way, the Poser scene gobbled all the memory going and then locked up Carrara;  as far as I know, it might have carried on gulping memory for a lot longer than a feeble 1.5Gb.)