This:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2404302

is as good as it gets for me, on my machine... sigh.  I am letting Carrara users know, in case anyone wants to take on the project of making backgrounds for people like me. I buy a LOT of backgrounds here at the marketplace.

Best,

Lyne

and PS.. I DID lower all the render settings, and I DID pull as much out of the scene(s) as I could to make it less resource intense...it's just no go with any of Howie's glorious sets.

I've got that set.  If you wanna send me a camera setup, I can try a render of what your lookin at at a larger size.  If it works, I will send you the render.  :)

Lyne - A couple of things that might help, if you haven't already tried them. Reducing your tile size can help reduce the required RAM when rendering complex scenes, and rendering straight from the batch que without opening the Carrara project first will give you the extra RAM needed when the scene is open for rendering (hope this one makes sense, basically your scene is just opened by the renderer, so it uses less RAM).

Hello Lyne,

:)

Have you tried the masking  trick?

Put a vertex plane in front of the camera to hide the scene. Make the plane about ten polygons. Turn off cast shadows and receive shadows for the plane. Then one by one make the poly's invisable and just render that part of the scene.

Make them invisable by either deleting the  poly then refilling it with the Fill command - or changing ther shader for that polygon.

Join them up in photoshop or whatever. I use this all the time to rerender parts of a scene that I screwed up...

to zoom  in on the scene can you just make  it wireframe in the assembly  room.

Regards from Oz,

still having fun with Travis et al thankyou

Thats a good trick!  I need to try that.  I had just previously made planes and move them around...but sounds like you could parent this to the camera, and just use it as needed

His versions for Vue are more efficient on my machine.