Like so?

I could send you a file, but if I recall, I just built it off the ecolo-go! file in the "Samples 1" collection from the Extras CD. Do you have that?

I haven't been brave enough to try to animate this one yet, but here's a still image using this technique:

Here's a quick test using the same gradient as a map, but changing the poser figures out for an animated primitive saved as a .vob. It seems to me that a guy could save several animated .vobs of different shapes and z-movements to end up with a rudimentary in-Vue particle system. The applications might be limited --I'm thinking mostly of tornado and explosion debris-- but it would be interesting to see what others come up with. When I have some real time I'll try to animate something a little more realistic than choreographed cylinders!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OHZPbfxZuM

Here's my first attempt.

I got it to work in still form, but decided to jump ahead a step or two and animated it. There are about 2,000 guys, and they don't behave in the way I had hoped, by spreading outward in straight lines from the center, but this is still an interesting result. I'll keep working on it as time allows.

www.youtube.com/watch

Thanks again for the pointers and screen shots!

Thank you so much! I'll have to fiddle around with that; it could help a lot with a concept I've been thinking over.

Interesting. Is it possible to have the fish all facing outward from the center with a projected texture map?

I like Mesh Factory.

Loading separate animated figures is how I do it, because like you I don't see any way around it. And I'd load two horses per body texture to confound the eye from seeing that they're the same.

But I'd love to hear that I'm wrong and that you can start different instances at different keyframes in Vue. That would be wonderful!

Thanks, Rich. Now I can see that it's only the same image as in the first post!

Eagle66, I guess I'm not understanding why you're not happy with the trees in your castle render. Other than the jpeg artifacting, the ones in front of the castle look realistic to me.

Your example returns a 400 error for me, so I can't even see what you're talking about.

I played with it for a few minutes, and came up with this:

I could have worked harder on blending the plants and blurring them slightly to fit with the surroundings, but I'm thinking the matte line is key. Once I adjusted it to more realistically fit the contour of the cliff, the image started looking better. The default weed clump does leave a lot to be desired, but with only slightly better tools than mine (this was done in Photoshop Elements, so I couldn't load a selection from an alpha channel), more could be done to fit it in.

Well done!

Didn't take as long as I thought it would to upload the other animation. Here you go:

www.youtube.com/watch

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!

I did these in Vue Studio Pro 6:

www.youtube.com/watch

www.youtube.com/watch

Vue can be finicky with this stuff, but it is possible.