Aside from getting a single bird and animating about a dozen of these in a Poser scene - what would be an alternative way to get a flock of birds into your Vue scene and have them fly?

I purchased a .vob file that is a flock of birds and they're objects but they aren't animated.  Can they be animated to "flap" in VUE?

tks

Well, I suppose you could "unwield" the bird with the object editor, and then rotate the wings by hand, but this would be very tedious. Poser is the best solution if you have it.

Every bird should have a unique movement or it will look atificial. Long ago since i animated something in poser, but cant you just copy one birds animation and then move the keyframes a bit or so? I think that should be sufficient for each one to look unique.

Yes thanks. But since these will likely be seen from a distance they don't have to have much detail - just movement.  I just want to give the scene some movement / life.  So I guess I need some sort of basic bird model that I can duplicate in a poser scene - over and over......seems tedious and it would seem that a flock of birds flapping their wings would be something someone would be offering as a poser scene somewhere that I could import....so far nothing has turned up but the static model I mentioned.

1.  You could do several things.  Make a simple bird with flapping wings in Vue.  Link the wings to the body.  Duplicate it, then use time splines to make the wings flap differently for each one.  You can also make the speed, and direction change the same way.  A complicated flock of birs can be made this way.

2.  If the birds are far in the distance or up high, they don't need to be 3D or color.  Use the animation you made in #1 and render it as a mask.  Use this animation as an animated texture on an alpha plane in the background.  To make them color, render the animation twice once in color and again as a mask.  Combine then in the animated texture on the alpha plane.  

Remember, the animation needs to be rendered as an uncompressed AVI.  It will be a big file, but it will save your CPU from having to animate 3D when it isn't necessary.     

There are many free simple bird models to download.  

I do love animated textures and time splines.  I feel they are some of the most useful things in VUE.
  

Dunno about birds, but last summer I bought  wasp model frm Daz, that came with a bunch of them animated, flying in all directions, all done by a python script.

check this tutorial for random animation, it may give you some idea
http://www.vuetutorials.com  tutorial #6

You could look at my Songbird ReMix products--  they transfer well to vue via a poser import and and can be stationary, full flight and everything in-between...  I don't have a python script for a swarm like  Noggins wasps (yet) but there are several animated take-off, flight and landing sequences in pose pack.  For examples for animation look at:: http://www.empken.com/gallery/gallerybodydv.html.