yea i been watching the history channel alot lately and they have this show where they recreate old wars like roman , greek,Nordic,And the goths times style of battle and they recreate i couldnt tell if it was or not ? what ever it is , it is an excent idea that some one had to ,on yet another field of 3D animation for people to make some cash .

I've seen the dork & such used on Court TV, as well commericals in my local area.

I've been wondering about those fields of battle too. They could be done in Poser, with super-lo-res figures. But they don't quite look Poserish to my non-artistic eyes.

The newest one, with the Romans, has battle scenes from a new video game. Apparently someone believes this game has accurate portrayal. I don't remember which game, but if you watch enough commercials on the History Channel, you'll catch the name.

THC itself doesn't, but many of the small compaies that produce their shows for them do.

Attached Link: http://pc.ign.com/articles/532/532411p1.html

Here's a link to an article at IGN:

oooh -- so they didn't actually use stuff from the game, just the game's engine (which is really good at crowds) in that show. Very sweet.

They actually come from a game called "Rome: Total War". I bought it a couple of weeks ago and it's way too addictive. My posering has taken a back seat since getting it!

Well,I've watched the series so far and to a degree I think its ridiculous lol...Using The Latest Video Game Technology To Re-enact Famous Battles In Ways We Never Could Before.Puh-lease...the scenes for the story of Herman the German and Boudicea look exactly the same and to a great degree its a waste of time watching it. A better use are the remade videos on MTV where your favorite game characters become rock musicians lol...I absolutely loved the one with BloodReign doing the latest Evanescence song;P

yea i was just saying Armorbeast that by watching that it has opened a new field of 3d to all , you say its not great and can be way better . i agree i think poser could do a better job. With low res for the big scene shot of the battle, might wanna render with some other 3D software. And since i noticed that there close up shot could have alot more and i mean alot more detai animation sequences. I"d be worried if that was my sweet job!!!!

Poser could absolutely do better lol...some of those characters look almost dated enough to come from the early 90's so I wouldn't say it was the latest video game technology:p

I've watched most of the series so far and have to give them credit for the work involved. Come on, for one battle scene in LOTR, it must have involved hundreds of people, hundreds of computers, thousands of hours, and millions of dollars. These guys are making a 20 minute series on a relatively small budget (I'll bet) and, personally, it is an amazing first effort. Go figure that many of the battle scenes look very similar. How varied do you think 40,000 Romans against a horde of Barbarians can be portrayed?! ;0) Poser could NEVER be capable of doing this. Poser can barely handle 100 lo-res figures, how could it possibly handle 50,000 lo-res figures? This is putting 3D video card rendering technology to its test for sure.

Per episode budget is just shy of 45,000.

Is that "Time Commanders", or some other show? "Time Commanders", they have a team controlling one side in the game, and a couple of historians kibbitzing from the sidelines. A lot of the mistake the command team make are at the "principles of war" level.

The show is "Decisive Battles".

just watch the new one i payed close attenion this time Man i played better games than that when they still had arcades. For Example " dragons layer" blows the graphic"s away on this show . hell you can do better than that with a game map/level maker. From 1942 BF. Im not knocking ther effort cus there talent go far beyond my knowledge. of animation and there original idea for artist to profit and to make history fun for children & adults. But i say again if i was the project manager or on that team with a 45,000 budget i think with some of are top Hobbie aniamtors would smoke that team. If I was them i be worried bout my Job!!!!! LOL not with just poser though ,ofcource every one that i every had a conversation with has knowledeg of at least 2- 4 3D software platform. Maya would be the Software to use i think, but some would argue with me on that im sure>:)

With 20,000 to 100,000 individual 'actors', including horses, elephants, arrows, spears, trees? Since I can't find this budget info, I'm supposing that this is the TOTAL budget per episode - meaning the payment to narrator, cameras, going on location, etc., etc., etc. Even if this were strictly for the computer animation, I'd say that the time to do the characters (yeah, they're not great), develop the armies, formations, scenery, scripting, work out the AI, cameras, and on and on, is costly in both time, personnel, computers, and so on and on. Yeah, Maya would be better if you had a year to render each episode. Plus, I take it that this is not 'strictly' scripted. The game engine AI probably accounts for alot of the 'action'. The AI for LOTR was in-house and it's a sure bet that developmental costs were more than all of the episode budgets combined. LOTR TOTAL PRODUCTION COSTS: ALMOST $300,000,000 ($45,000 X 13 episodes = $585,000) When have you seen BF 1942 with 50,000 soldiers? I haven't seen any gameplay with those numbers. What'chu smokin', babe?

yea that per episode i was just useing 1942 as an example i guess it was a bad example. But the terrian /background on the show is pretty basic . you can get when moveing a huge formation of soldiers on the show they do wide angle still shot to enfisize the volume of soldiers in thers rank and the very short movement they zoom in to only bout ,at the most 500 then make the formation movement with that amount the close up action shots looked like the America's Army game 1.5 thats came out bout 3 years ago. I am a die hard Americas Army Game Player . I think if they could get the right permission they should use the UNreal Game engine. that would be sweet . Game engines " is all unfamiler territory for me . What do you think the fasttest renderer and most productive Animation software is?? you sound like you have some experience in 3D work as an ocuppation and what do you use kuroyume0161????

You guys really need to check out Rome:Total War from activision. Epic battles with thousands of men, zoom in to the action. It's got everything!

Um, don't forget that that budget per episode pays for everything in it -- including printing costs, editing, narration fees, equipment leasing, licensing fees, etc. etc. I'd love to see the show, but don't have cable, lol. However, I'm willing to bet they are getting the most bang for their buck they can. Maya might be the best tool for creating them, but that creating takes time, and that time takes money. Given what they are doing and wha thtey have time to work with, I sorta think we should all be saying holy cow. (and, to be honest, they are saying wow, lookit what we did without awesome funding. Now, of course, they want more money....:))

The game engine and hardware rendering capabilities (in this case, CPU and GPU) definitely make a difference, but the bottom line is speed - speed based upon the number of polygons and points. Look at any 3D graphics card and the most highlighted features are texels/sec (texturing polygons) and vertices/sec (polygon points). Using obviously rough figures, let's say there are 40,000 'actors' in the scene, each having only 500 polygons each. That's 20,000,000 polygons to be processed, not including the scenery and props, per frame. Doesn't matter how many are quickly removed from the rendering pipeline, each polygon is still needed to be checked at least once per frame. I know for a fact that my machine (dual Xeon 2.66GHz, 4GB memory, GeForceFX 5900 Ultra) and Cinema4D/Poser/Vue/LightWave/Shade would choke on polygon counts like this. We're talking the difference between slow CPU renderers that give high quality at slow speeds and fast GPU renderers that give okay quality at high speeds. 3D Animation software (like Maya, Cinema4D, LightWave, Houdini, SoftImage, 3DSMax, Shade, Vue, etc.) are geared towards the first type. 3D Game Engines using OpenGL or DirectX are geared for the latter. As ynsaen points out, with the given total episodal budget, this is probably the best they could do within that budget considering other restraints.