@3D-Mobster: Thanks for the tips. When I work with more than two figures at a time, I turn off hardware antialiasing, hardware shading, and mipmaps, on the theory that that should help with performance. But now that I think about it, those settings only apply to textures, not to other aspects of the figures, and I don't think textures are the cause of my issues. I delete all bump/disp maps and use simple procedural shaders whenever possible, and I keep items with transparency in wireframe mode. I suspect the performance issues have more to do with how Poser is handling poly count, morphs, and rigging. (FYI: I never use subdivision on anything.)

@ironsoul: Thanks for your reply. Yes, Poser will start to lag when I'm setting up a scene with lots of props, but it takes a lot longer to get to "unusable" (or a crash) compared to when I'm working with figures. Over the past two weeks I've been building my main character's bedroom, using a room I created in Cheetah3D as well as a variety of props I modified and/or re-mapped and textured in Cheetah. Cheetah has no problem handling the room with all props visible AND all texture maps applied in .PSD format, for as long as I want to have it open -- and I can even open and work in other Cheetah files at the same time. So I try to do as much setup as I can there, but of course the lighting and texture display aren't exactly the same. When I'm ready to see how things look in Poser, I export the props as OBJs and the textures as JPGs and load everything into a new Poser scene file. But Poser can only handle them for about an hour before it stops responding to my dial turns.

Macs have an Activity Monitor that shows real-time CPU, RAM and disk usage, but the only time I've noticed Poser using close to 100% of the CPU is when I'm rendering, which makes sense. Macs also have a Console tool that displays a variety of system and app logs as well as crash reports, but I'm not a programmer, so I don't know how to interpret those. I'm enough of a techie "fiddler" that I often study Poser crash reports, hoping I can somehow make sense of them, but apparently my glasses don't have "Magic Decoder Ring" technology :-)

I will fiddle around some more tomorrow to see if I can activate some kind of logging that will give me some insight into what's happening as I work with a file like the one with two V4s, two horses, and a park.

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TOOLS: MacBook Pro; Poser Pro 11; Cheetah3D; Photoshop CC

FIGURES: S-16 (improved V4 by Karina), M4, K4, Mavka, Toons, and Nursoda's people

GOALS: Stylized and non-photorealistic renders in various fantasy styles