Thank you all for your answers, lots of food for thought. But sadly enough - having had some time to fiddle around with Vue 5 - the biggest difference to Bryce seems to be that it crashes unpredictably. While I can really live with the re-texturing of imported objects (it can indeed be fun and an inspiring process adapting materials to a specific rendering system), I can't live with that. While I mostly knew why I'd driven Bryce into another crash (adding the twenty-1st of a 30 billion polygon object, having a 256MB worth of jpg textures in the library and then hit undo twice or such foolishness), I wasn't able to figure out what Vue dislikes about what I'm doing. I begin to believe that there is a very ugly bug in internal memory management, and that it hits at random...

Many thanks for the efforts... but I guess this just doesn't lead to the heart of the problem (I tried your suggestions, but... ). I don't believe this is really about textures, or bump maps, or physical memory. It must be some internal error, most likely some value overflow that fitted into the file format nevertheless... sigh. I guess I have to redo that from the beginning...

OK, maybe I wasn't precise enough - sorry for that. What I called a scene is of course a loaded *.pz3 file (5 Michael 2.0, 4 Michael 3.0, Clothing, Props etc.) into which I imported a separate *.pz3 file with a single Vicky & clothing. The resulting document is quite big (approx.. 245MB on disk), but I've done bigger ones. Ever since that import I get the error message above when I try to render. I already replaced the imported character with a less poly mesh, but the error keeps coming. I also checked every texture and basic colourization and re-applied everything on the Vicky character... Cheers, Gerhard

Thanks to all who answered that fast. Especially that tutorial (by Tony Bolton) proposed by wdupre seems very good advice. Maybe I'll get as far as daring to load up some works...