Ok so I created some nice NICE trees, turned out to be 10-15k polys each. Unfortunately the huge scope of the project took a lot of foliage to create a convincing ground cover, rocketing my poly count up to 4.5 MILLION friggin triangles. It just wouldn't render no matter what So now at least for the mid range distance trees in a shot I'm using 500 poly trees. the ones really far back are like 3, lol. Still looks ok in a moving shot with depth of field going, but I wish I had my super-trees. 2.37 gigs(XP limit) plus 3 hard drives with 4 gig paging files still didn't like it