carrara crashed
sigh

so I restarted it and vow not to touch the computer for any reason til its done.  It got caught in an infinite loop...one of the processors went to 100% and the render "box" wouldn't finish.  When I tried to restart it from the last finished frame, the "haze" didnt look the same and it was obvious where the first render had been going and changed to the second pass, so I had to start ALL over.

sigh again
Ive tried "creating real instances" (big mistake)..each render went from 36 minutes to 5+ hours each.

so the replicator is the only way to do it.  I guess the time its taking between each render pass is to map the textures to each object.

so, until next weekend (or so), I wont have any more images of this to show.

BT