Hi arran,

thanks for the response. Think I do need to reduce my textures considerably. The meshes are clean, and the scene has about 175,000 faces - I don't think that is massive (got an old comp though, amd 3200+, 1 gig ram, 6800 128 mb).

... I've been goggling possible issues.

I've got a couple of questions if I can:

1) Maya seems to crash when I get near 1 gig of memory (watching the task manager)... doesn't mental ray use virtual memory?

2) I've read that I should alter mental ray's memory limit, but don't see any hint in the help files where to do this. Could this help, and how do I do this?

3) I've read that adjusting BSP could help, and the help files lists it as being under shadows in the settings. Could this be a solution?

4) Could setting my polys to single sided help?

5) I've read that it is possible to instance textures (I use sometimes the same map for diffuse, bump etc). How is this different from duplicating with ctrl+d?

sorry for all the questions, I could look into these just now, but I've been up for hours staring at failed renders... kind of tired and needing to go to bed.

cheers

gubar