jroussel: No, not that I know of. 'Loaded' textures seem to remain resident no matter what you do short of hacking into your memory addresses using programmer's tools and risking crashing the program and the machine (especially when Poser thinks they are loaded and tells your video card they are -- don't really try that). However, the actual entire file is not in memory -- just a thumbnail of it. That means that if you have a 3000x3000 PX image 'loaded' you still probably only have a small 'thumnail' version resident in memory until render time. I don't know if Poser loads all 'loaded' images fully at render time, or just those actually used in the scene. From what I do know, there are soem thing that if you can afford to skimp on in a Poser scene will make the rendering easier and use less memory in so doing. 1) if you have a lot of small figures, don't use high-res figures -- use low res figures. If you're making a scene of a theatre audience with dozens or hundreds of people, don't use Mike and Vicki -- use the P1 figures. If they are small and far away, it won'r make a lot of difference. 2) some people have developed tricks for making images of masses of people. One of those tricks is to render things in pieces and either composite into the background bit by bit (for an example of this, look in the galleries for my Escape from the Emerald City picture) or to render figures one at a time to TIFF, then extract the alpha channel for use as a trans map and texture these figures onto one-sided planes -- in other words, make virtual 'cardboard cutouts'. Stuff like this is harder to do, of course, when you're wanting to animate. In P5 I hear tell you can use animated textures. In P4 you pretty much have to do it the background-composite way. 3) use smaller shadow maps, especially with more lights. This will give you cruddier-looking shadows, especially if you have a lot of objects, but if you also have a lot of lights it shouldn't be too noticeable. If you're working with 20 lights in a scene, try dropping the map setting of the lights to 32-bit instead of the default 256-bit. Conversely, if you're doing a scene with only one light and a lot of stuff (or a high-poly figure) and your shadows are coming out like crap, raise the map size. For my recent product pics, I have been using a copy of the default Rembrandt lighting that I upped to 1024-bit maps, which makes for very crisp renders. But it takes a lot more time and memory to render those.