Hello CC,

One of the best "speedup tricks" I've learned (in a thread I don't remember, in a forum I can't remember, sorry) is that you can load as many figures and props into a scene as your system RAM can handle.
At some point it will slow down your UI to almost unresponsive, making working with the scene impossible.

So the trick is to make everything invisible except the figures/props you need right now!
Then you can pose them as usual, with no big lagging.
Only when you think that everything is posed and textured OK, your camera and lights are positioned and set, only then turn everything else visible again, have a last look at the scene, save it, use the "Raytrace Preview" for a last check, and then render.

I've managed to cram twelve V4's (with clothing) and a rather complex "stage" prop into my 16 GB RAM (and it rendered OK, too). However, as soon as I made *everything" visible, I only could but kill Poser in the task manager because it sat dead in the water, overwhelmed by an amount of calculations that would make a CRAY billow smoke...)

Related, and concerning the Morph Brush:

When you work on high polycount models (like hair figures/props, or some clothing items), you may also notice that the morph brush becomes unresponsive to the point to "not responding" Windows message.
In this case, move the mouse well out of the preview window and have a cup of coffee ;)
After you've finished, take care *not" to move your mouse back into the preview window! Instead, untick "Display Brush" in the Morphing Tool widget!
Of course, from now on you'll have to make a good guess on which vertices will be affected because all you'll see is the standard mouse cursor - but you'll gain expierience over time, and you'll have a morph brush which works like a charm.

Just two things which came to my mind immediately.
HTH, and "Happy Posering"!

Peter