For a distance shot, you don't need those hi-res maps. Perhaps you should make reduced resolution versions of them, if you really want to render them all at once.

Or you could tediously render them in small groups and composite them for the final image.

By the way, do you want them to look good, or as they originally looked? I ask, because VSS should be able to make quick work of putting good shaders on them.

Here is the (laughable) "ZWoman", as loaded on the left, and with the VSS treatment on the right. She don't bend so good, her texture seams are crazy, she can't move her eyes to look up without them falling out of her head, and she can't smile. But the un-posed geometry is pretty nice. Somebody should take this into the setup room and fix it. It's a good filler woman for background characters.

The shaders on her are terrible and don't even try to use the included color map. The color map is really bad, hand-drawn and very low resolution. Nevertheless, with the VSS skin shader applied, it looks pretty good.

I don't know why people put so much effort and devote so much memory to the texture maps. A good shader is the key.

(click for full size)

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)