Anyone know a fur suit was made for Monkey here?

ROTFL!!

Had more than a few of those moments.

LOL... this is why you always save right before you hit the render button. It's almost a reflex with me now.

Note - this is true for any CG application... DS, Poser, 3DS Max, Lightwave, Modo...

...and oh, always save your files incrementally (coolImg001,duf, coolImg002.duf - a syntax like that.)

Though it's mega-rare these days that a particular scene file will crash the app, you wind up thanking yourself when you mess something up beyond belief and accidentally save the mistakes. Much easier to roll back to the last incremental save (say, coolImg053.duf) and start with only a little to catch up over, than it is to start from nothing.

But then, at least for me it's mega-rare that a scene will crash the application in render. I still do the incremental saves so that if I change my mind on a series of stills, I can go back and replicate that change where needed on previous scene files for continuity's sake.

Some things to help prevent crashing:

1. (prolly too late now for this one, but next time y'all go shopping) - don't cheap-out on the hardware - doubly so for anything with a GPU on it. Generic braded stuff and "House Brand" stuff might have a nice, fat price difference, but you only save money at the expense of time (time spent troubleshooting, time spent reloading stuff after it crashes, time buying replacement parts after that cheap part dies prematurely because it wasn't built to handle the abuse that CG application usage will always put on it... Stuff like that.)

2. If you have any drivers or other low-level stuff in your OS that is way outside of typical use, it'll sometimes gonna get in the way. For instance, I have a driver on my Windows-based laptop that allows me to read and write to disks formatted with Apple HFS/+ (so I can read all my old Mac disks.) This would be one of my first suspects if DS started acting wonky right after I installed the thing (especially if I had the installation or my DS/Poser libraries sitting on that external oddball-formatted disk.)

3. Only use approved drivers for the stuff DS relies on. For example, only the latest stable official nVidia driver for the GPU (if the laptop/desktop-supplied driver doesn't quite work). Only vendor-built drivers for everything else (doubly so if you're doing this on a laptop.)

4. Could be a resource issue. Now if you have 32GB of RAM, an SSD disk, and a late-model i7/Ryzen processor? It's probably not a resource issue, unless you have lots of other resource-hungry stuff going on at the same time.

The fur on that monkey in the picture appears to just be a UV Map (it's painted on).

On the other issue: I have two machines, I compose the scene on one, save it to a network drive, then render it on another machine on the network. I realize there is some cost involved in that ;) But there are two upsides: (1) My scene by definition is saved before I start rendering, and (2) since I do comics, I can keep working on them while rendering is going on rather than losing my train of thought. I have a pair of Dell Precision Workstations I bought used, so the whole system came in around $2,500.

Been there, done that, even though I know better ... I will no doubt do it again ....