Ah! now that ive added six planes to the deck render times are through the roof with AO and it runs out of memory well before its finished
Its says memory limit is 128mb, is there any way to increase it?
EDIT: checked script editor and every time I render I get a message like this (number not the same every time)
// Warning: (Mayatomr.Script): Computed memory limit of 51 MB is below threshold, setting to 128 MB instead //
any idea what the problem is?

does this mean I have to learn about render layers?