Where the OP said they had poser 11, they could take the figures in there to reduce and combine, but that could be a pain. For all me large scenes, I never do either. I've had problems with poor movement of the clothing.

I agree that changing the display settings will help a little. Avoid any that show the texture or the wireframe. Changing the tracking to bounding boxes only is even faster, but it's hard to do detailed posing with that. Don't use fast tracking. It is anything but fast. And hiding figures helps big time. On most scenes I only have the figure I'm working on showing at a time.

As far as speed of loading the scene, aside from reducing polygons, I don't think there's much you can do. I don't remember if Poser 2014 has autosave but if it does, you might want to turn it off for these scenes and just set some kind of reminder to save once in a while. I had one scene that took over an hour to load. By the time it was done, the autosave wanted to start.

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