Why did this work? LIE Tattoos

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I have been having a hell of a time with LIE tattoos. Whenever I apply one my system increases render times by 6 fold or I get a solid black figure no matter how much light I hit it with.

The test~I took a single figure G8M with no background for this test. I applied the LIE tattoos (3x) and ran a render, 7 minutes later a totally black figure was displayed with 4 spotlights aimed at it. A usual result but not consistant. Sometimes it appears as it should but the render takes hours.

I then took the figure and made it a "support asset" saving it tattoos and all. I opened it as a new file and rendered. 58 seconds later the figure appeared as perfectly as a figure with that much light could. I finished my render with all three figures loaded with tattoos without a hitch??

 I am upgrading my system soon but it would be nice to understand why this seems to work?

Sytem~I am running a I7-3770k cpu with a GTX-660 graphics card. Plenty of drive space on a 2TB FireCuda SSHD Hybrid. So yes it is a patched up older system.