so it turned out to be a memory issue? how much memory does your machine have? maybe they should update the packages 'system requirements' to show the package requires X ammount of memory. I know i've worked on some scenes that a machine, no matter how powerful the processor, if it only had 128 megs of ram there was no way it would work with the same scene (over 2 million polys and high res textures). Should try to figure out what the exact memory limits are for this one ;). your question: why make a 5000x3411 pixel texture map - simple answer really - to retain detail levels. For instance, my armor of the ancients uses a 2000x2000 texture map for each piece, however each piece is sharing the same texture map for the most part so only 2 2000x2000 texture maps are being used. I figured out the memory requirements by testing it on the two machines here and watching the memory usage on them, then figured in additional for working with a scene.