Thanks, Mazak. I uploaded them to youtube in the lousy-resolution days, but at least you can still see the ecosystems at work. If I have time today I'll upload another experiment at a better resolution.

EPICI, that's where Vue is finicky! What I did was create a plane (finite, not infinite), set its texture to transparent so that there wouldn't be a texture seam at its edge, and populated it with six or seven animated Poser figures. These were M3s with the MMP Viking add-ons. I ended up with about 15,000 figures. If I recall, I didn't force regular alignment because that would make them run in a perfectly, unnaturally square formation; a barbarian charge is not so coordinated. So by not forcing regular alignment but instead setting rotation to zero, they're populated randomly on the plane but running in the same direction. Whether you do this depends on how "trained" you want your soldiers to look. Then, to get my opposing charge, I simply copied and pasted the plane and rotated the whole thing 180 degrees. However, if I decided to change anything in the ecosystem, it would repopulate with them pointing in the original direction. I started animating a few times before realizing that! But it's a simple fix: repopulate if necessary after your changes, and then just remember to rotate the plane again before proceeding.

This is as far as I got with this particular experiment, and I've learned a few things since then but haven't applied them. I don't see why you couldn't array them in groups using either density maps or duplicated planes. Even in a single large group, a density map would be a good idea to produce ragged edges rather than perfect lines --unless you're wanting Greek-style phalanxes with more regular alignment.

I did the Barbarian Charge video with Vue 6 Pro Studio on a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 4GB SDRAM. Render time was a little under 3 hours for the 5-second animation. It went that fast because I "cheated" by pre-rendering the sky and forested hill as a still and used it as a static backdrop, so the only thing really being rendered was the figures.

Hope this helps, and good luck!