I agree, I have rendered the scenes that HowieFarkes has put together for Carrara and they are fairly complex with items.  There are some in his gallery that are pretty large.

His Gallery at cgsociety http://howiefarkes.cgsociety.org/gallery/
His Gallery on his own page http://howiefarkes.com/#_images/gallery/

This one was interesting
http://howiefarkes.cgsociety.org/gallery/559385/

100 instances of tree's with about 10,000 replications per instance