It's a big pz3 imported into carrara with lots of mil people fully dressed and an apollo. It mostly occurs when I try and render using toon pro. Sometimes instead or just before the crash I get a memory allocation error message when rendering. The carrara file is about 350mb big. I have a G5 mac with 2.7 dual processors and 5 gig of ram. Love esther

Crashing Vue?
You don't say how many figures are you using, but at 350mb it's going to be an awkward file anyway. And does the file render without Toon Pro?
If it is Toon Pro causing the problems email Eric Winemiller at:
ewinemiller@digitalcarversguild.com
Eric has always been helpful when I've emailed him with any DCG plug-in crashes or problems.

Or, can you render your image out in groups or layers (foreground, middle, background)?
And then using the alpha channel options and masks for photoshop files put it all together in an image editor  like photoshop, paint shop pro, gimp etc. I did that in my last Carrara image (Canyon Racers) . That approach reduces the strain on rendering and speeds up render times too.Thats the only thing I can think of.

sorry i meant carrara - haven't tried it in vue love esther

Esther,
The above is good advice. I would also remove trash objects or shaders. Altho this usually only helps prevent errors when saving, but could reduce file size. Also Try it with multi-threading off (to check for a bug). That is rather large and from what I have seen toon rendering can take alot more time to render. I don't use toon pro tho.