putrdude posted at 7:20AM Sat, 01 September 2018 - #4335562

randym77 posted at 11:34AM Fri, 31 August 2018 - #4335521

Since this is for a comic book, you'll be doing a lot of postwork anyway. Why not render the crowd piece by piece, then put it all together in Photoshop? Even low poly figures will choke your machine if you have "hundreds" of them.

Since this is for a still image, and not an animation, I would render the crowd in many different pieces, then layer them in Photoshop. That would have the advantage of allowing you to adjust the position, scale, etc. without having to re-render all week.

Thanks again for all the help. The "pane" thing is interesting, and might work for the formation since they all look the same, basically, especially from behind. And yes, lots of postwork. I guess making a hundred individual renders and put them on layers, boggles the mind. As was mentioned earlier, it depends on the shot and I can play around with that. For some stupid reason I always like making the full scene and then using different cameras for it, taking different shots. Plus I always like the full view shot. Probably not great for comic book. I'm so new at graphic novel/comic book, I'm still learning about that before plunging in, but my very first image is troops in formation. Kill me. :)

Sounds like the best option is to use a script to automatically place duplicates of your figure into a grid pattern, I'd be surprised if one didn't exist already, maybe someone here knows ? The row behind the lead figure below is an example of a script built formation, each figure is taken from a random frame of an animation to give some variation. Will have a look to see if the script can be changed to build as a grid but as I'm away this weekend its not going to be a quick response.