Creating a scene with huge amount of geometry I'm fascinated by the beautiful images Lee Griggs is able to create with Maya modelling and Arnold rendering.. e.g: 



I'm attempting to reproduce his effect in Blender. My first stab at it is adding a big pile of cubes to the scene, displacing them according to an external texture, and adding a common material with colour based on object position. This massive number of objects seems to be too much for Blender to handle (or maybe I just need to get a better computer?).

Should it be possible to create such an image in Blender? If so, what tricks might one need to know about, in order to get around computational limitations? Or should I accept that some things just can't be done?
Try using dupliverts:



It's not really that pretty, but this is just a demo.. Rendered in 6 minutes


Create a very subdivided plane, then delete only edges and face so that you are left with just vertices.
Add a cube and parent it to the plane.
Add a displace modifier on the plane, and setup a texture to use a displacement.
Enable dupliverts on the plane.