Ah, bagginsbill, please don't permit me to become responsible for the perpetuation of a nascent falsehood!

Thank you for the information. What you say makes sense. People have been promoting procedural shaders as a way to reduce the load on the renderer, after all.

But when it comes to textures, I have some products that have multiple image maps (as many as 10+) for each material zone for figures that have themselves multiple zones. It's a lot of image maps. These products will render at smaller resolutions, but trying to render them at a larger resolution is impossible for me.

So when I say "materials" as being part of the equation, I'm including these image map heavy set-ups. I used the word "materials" because, well, they're accessible through the material room. But perhaps my terminology is incorrect? Should image maps all be referred to as "textures"? If so, I'll be happy to correct my usage.

On the other hand, if a single figure has 30 image maps of varying resolutions associated with it, (and I have a fully clothed human wearing 12 such figures) and this should not affect rendering, then I need to figure out what else is going on with the scene.

Now, I have also been told that AO can cause a significant slow down. If that's incorrect, please tell me. AO is type of shader, isn't it? If not, again, don't hesitate to correct me. If I'm using the terminology incorrectly, we'll never communicate properly. Reflections, too, can be a problem?

When I say that fixing materials is a headache, I am partly referring to resizing all of those image maps to the appropriate size for each render (and obviously the bigger the render, the bigger some of those maps need to be) depending on the figures' locations in the scene. Or I'm thinking that there ought to be a way to recreate the effect without using all those image maps, but for me this is no small  matter.

That being said, there are also some scenes, which for whatever reason, I just cannot render at decent resolutions. I want to know why. When I look at the scenes that are problems, it doesn't seem to be polygons that are causing the trouble. But what I do see is a material room that's complex enough to my eyes to look like an Italian pasta buffet.

If anything I've said is clearly false, I do beg you to please correct me.

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PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.