Hi Brion
I picked up this post a little late in the day but as a fellow Mac user I was interested in your question so I'll try and help anyway. After checking out the tut there are some problems where macs are concerned. Firstly there are notorious problems with the jpeg.p in LW7.5 and OSX so the general rule is to bin it so that imported jpegs are handled by the Quicktime plug-in instead.
Trouble is if you bin it then the option to write to jpeg isn't there when it comes to Skybaker (at least on my machine it isn't) in which case you'll need to render out to another file type without an alpha channel. So even if you can render your baked sky to jpeg o.k it is likely that come import time you'll have trouble.
On a Mac you are not doing too bad at 1% per 7 mins with only 256 mb of ram, try maxing out your ram ( cheapest deal is from Crucial.com), it can make a big difference. You didn't say what system you are on but if you are using system 9 you'll find OSX much more stable when it comes to LightWave.
If you are prepared to sacrifice quality for speed then a resolution size of 2048 is quite hefty so you could try cutting that down and reducing the Skytracer quality too.
If all else fails then it's time to render overnight.
HTH
Cheers
tnarg
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