Earlier this year I made an image where I came up with a trick to make more efficient asteroid ecosystems, when you want say, a scene with a planetary asteroid ring, but, you don't need a whole flipping great ring object, populated with bazillions of rocks!
Only need sufficent for the space in front of the camera.
GeekAtPlay.com has a couple of good tutorials on asteroids, but this is a bit different
Suppose this could also be applied to Lightwave, Max etc?
Tutorials: #37 - Close-Up Asteroid Ring in Vue