Okay... :Grins: maybe some of you brilliant people can help me out. I'm doing a series of illustrations for a book (it's a game book) I'm doing the chapters.. and I've gotten every one done but one.. and it's the one about mass combat... War.. etc... Now... Ideally I just do some simple models in poser, pull them into bryce and etc... unfrotunately I've tried that and bryce dies after so many. :grins: so much for a p4 and a half gig of ram. Any suggestions on how I may go about this? Anz

Photoshop composition. Easiest way.

Hmm...... hate doing that.... but I guess if they are far enough away and I create a mass shadow for all of them.... man... that will take FOREVER :grins: "Okay.. I can render about 6 men at a time... how many do we need? 2000... okay... it takes... hmm...." Maybe after I render a few I can just keep copying and pasting... then throw a filter over it to cover it up :grins: Anz

Use the low-res figures that come with Poser for characters in the background. They aren't the focus of the image, and aren't close up, so they don't need as much detail. The same goes for their textures, clothing, and props.

Maybe if you got a photo of a croud of soilders you could use that as a masked plane....Sharen

I have been using Poser people on 2D pict objects in Bryce a lot recently. I speeds up render time and the people render MUCH better in Poser than in Bryce. I would suggest doing some renders of several people in the crowd scene together, exporting the render as a tiff, and repeating as many times as necessary using different poses and such for variety. Then you can set up the crowd as a series of 2D pict objects in your scene, or, you can composit them together in Photoshop and use THAT composite on a 2D pict object in Bryce. Do the people closer to the camera as full blown imported meshes for realism.

hehehe - couldn't resist :) Seriously - why not take an image of massed troops to use as a background? One thing I have noticed (military history was my minor), is that most images of combat and fighting in the modern era don't really include more than 10 folks at a time (Even D-Day photos rarely showed more than a clump of 10-20 soldiers at any one time, and most of those exceptions were shots of the backs of helmets in a landing craft heading towards the beach...) Which era are you working on? Ancient battles, like Greece or Rome, will naturally need huge crowds in near-square Phalanx/Legion formations... and don't forget that Roman formations number exactly 100 men + the Centurion, and are perfectly square (Greek formations are kind of rounded at the flanks.) Medieval battles up to the US Civil War usually have ragged lines of men charging en-masse, with cavalry thrown in... the further back you go, the less ragged they'll look in formation. Modern battle images are usually the easiest to do, since they're broken down into encompassing squads of 5-10 men, tops. The best general Poser battle to do would involve a Naval one, say, somewhere around the battle of Trafalgar. A shot of "boarders away!", where men are assaulting one ship from another, would seriously rock. Also, naval battles by their very virtue don't require as many people filling up a scene :) I'd be real interested in seeing what eventually comes of it, if you don't mind posting the results. /P

It's medeival/fantasy based so my options are pretty much from greece-medieval to ships. I already have a ship picture so I'm going to leave it alone.. I was using a poser 2 low figure to try to make a few small units of roman type troops and after 6 bryce went nuts. :grins: 100,000 polygons apiece still, though. See.. I was thinking like you, a small group maybe but the problem is rendering more than a few at a time is almost useless. I'm going to have to use some trick to do it all. Thanks for the help... Anz

Even if you can't find an image of troops, make a troop clone (i.e. one you can duplicate a hundred times and it won't take away from the realism of the image), and render some "up front" soldiers in different poses, slightly different clothing, faces, etc. For each render you do, save a silouette picture, with the figure white and background black, open up Bryce, click on the picture object icon, configure the texture map, along with the trans map, and voila. Its there.

If I recall correctly, someone had a utility to generate a crowd in Poser; I'll be damned if I could remember where it is, but I distinctly recall the advert popping up here in R'osity's banner adds. Maybe you could gin up a render of Romans in camp getting prepared for battle (or coming back from one?) That way, you only need a small knot of 'em talking as they put their armor on and check their gear. In the background, you can use a lot of Phil C's low-polycount Poser figures (2,500 polys each, I think - they're on his site somewhere) throughout the background... they're still fairly passable as long as you blur/fog them a touch in Bryce. Another idea would be to show a primitive Roman army surgeon, working on a wounded soldier... though I don't know what threshold of gore you have to work under... I guess what I'm angling towards is that instead of showing a huge battle scene, perhaps you could show other aspects of army life in ancient times, like a soldier standing post on a fort wall, soldiers gearing up for battle, a Centurion and his messenger assessing a field they had just won (dead bodies and busted weapons/shields can be low-poly and everywhere), a small raiding party razing a village, a small scouting party assessing a far-off encampment, etc etc. There are lots of ways to portray war itself without showing a scene packed tight with swords clashing and men everywhere... /P

do the background people like trees? I haven't quite figured it out yet but doesn't bryce have a feature that adds trees as 2d images on a vertical plane (that way your shadows are correct) am I making any sense?

All those are great ideas. I've been thinking about the "glimpse" of life maybe. I like the idea of a army surgeon though I think it beyond my ability. :grins: But those others.... hmm.... Diving in again. I could probably do that with the pictures, set them up in 2-d and just make sure they are facing all the same way. So many ideas... :grins: Anz

The lines at the Battle of Hastings were about 10 men deep, if that is any help. You have a problem if you go in too closely: that shows more gore and intensity. But if you are too removed, you need more figures. CacheForge has singlemesh warriors which won't cripple your computer as readily. Carolly