Re: maya using just 1.5GB RAM :(

Hmm, doesn't look that bad. Is it nurbs? Make sure your tesselation settings aren't going through the roof.
Another approcah would be to render the scene in passes, like redering out fg, bg, and mid objects so that you don't have to have all of them loadeded at the same time.
what kind of shader are you using? that can play a role as well.