I just finished an image (posted today) that made my new pc with 2GB ram choke.  Just 2 horses, tack and 3 human figures made Bryce 6 unable to save the file even though the polygon count was barely 1 million.  I suspect  it was the 40 or so textures that caused this, not the polygon count.  I think this is why professional 3D apps handle textures differently by keeping them in a separate place.  In any case, Bryce doesn't seem very efficient in handling large texture sets and perhaps the only solution is to adopt the other technique.  If I ever needed to populate a Bryce scene with 1000 horses I guess I'd be totally out of luck.

Just posted a comment, Yup, Mucho Highres mats will require some out of the Bryce box maneuvering. Nice work.

So....image maps on a seperate drive are a good thing to do?...that's always been my practice in any case but it's good to know it'll be good for Bryce.. ...

Explore your scene for double used textures. Take a look to your loaded te´xtures and you should see...if there are some double in there....

any textures you could create a lower rez copy for, i.e. small figures, distant objects? large texture maps should only be for hero objects when seen mid to foreground.

I'm betting it's just ONE texture. I was messing with the loco and a texture I used just didn't sit well with Bryce so I had to dump it for a less 'heavy' one.

The duplicate texture issue (and their removal) was one I ran into when I did my Siege series. Getting rid of the dupicates can save a lot of space on some scenes, less on others (depending on how the thing was put together). I'm guessing though that the only duplicate textures you have are the horse skins. (I liked somone's comment about it being a combination of 3d and photo lol)

I seem to remember reading that Vue has (allegedly) some advanced texture caching or some such thing to allow it to work better with large texture maps, but from my experience it seems worse than bryce at coping with the large textures that you get with poser.

I believe Bryster is one the right track. 

I had a similar experience when i made the Masters Series scene "The Block", where one single material brought the entire system down on its knees. Once i replaced that material, the scene rendered in less than 30 minutes, highres.

In my experience, Bryce normally don´t have much issues with massive scenes and highres textures as long as you use booleans and/or terrain objects. In fact, Bryce normally handle large scenes with 2-3000 pixel resolution textures better than most of the professional apps combined. :)
However, imported meshes is not always running as smoothly, and often those in combination with one particular texture can cause memory issues.

This may not be the easiest solution, but if i were you, i´ld grey the scene, and reload each texture to pinpoint the one possibly causing the issue. 

I agree.....I once had a problem texturing a Bryce model in Bryce 6, this one texture made it crash, I opened the exact scene/texture in Bryce 5 without a hitch

Had to split latest WIP into 2 sep files as both 5.5 and 6.1 are giving me "out of memory" messages. 5.5 will merge both files but then I can't work on it,render it or save it. Bugger ,GRRRRR!!!!!.   

Cheers
GG

Hrm, I also had a problem with one specific texture. Replacing it did the trick.

But now I am a little confused as to the title of this thread... supercomputer needed yet not a thing was mentioned about one. Rats! Now I'll have to find some other excuse to post the pic of mine.....