Hey guys. I want to build a middle age battle scene with lots of people in it. Are there any low poly count models around to fit the bill?

Hay castles need a sege from time to time

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Behond the coming back, is going too far

     ... The strange thing is that I never have a ready-reply for your questions Harold      

I'll search for something useful...

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How about the Poser 1 and Poser 2  people?  They are not pretty, but they can serve when you need many at once without close up details.

What software are you going to use to render with?  There is a trick that I came up with that may help you, but the details how to do it, will depend on you selection of rendering software.

Pangor

Have you looked at the P3 figures? Don't know what their count is but I would assume they are lowest of Poser people. Another thing would be to make a render of the characters take the image make an alpha map and put them in the scene using planes. Only real low poly people are in the games. Maybe visit a game forum, some of them supply the files needed to extract the figures from a game to use....

I'm doing my scene in bryce. The problem with p1 and p2 models is clothing. A business suit in a battle scene Yuck!  

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Behond the coming back, is going too far

If it is a far away scene then use Woody for the characters or look to bryce and build some small ones in there.   If your not going to show faces in some seens even changing there texture to look like clothes on them but its their body texture you will put the clothes on. Just an idea. Once you import Poser models it is possible to reduce the poly count.

Good, bryce supports this method well.  This is for the nonkey characters, like extras in Hollywood.   If there are going to be a number of figures in formation Outfit and render one figure of each needed pose.  Render each of them either individually or in small groups. Depending on your scene you could do that rendering in Poser or bryce.  It is better to make oversized renderings of these figures.  You will need to save these to disk with an alpha channel or you will need to prepare a transparency mask for each one.  They need to be aligned with the camera as they will appear in the final scene.

Building your scene, create a 2D picture object for each of your prerendered figures, use the rendered images for the diffuse and ambient maps.  If you prepared sepperate transmaps, use the transmap for transparency.  Set the texuring mode to "blend transmarency".  You could also create and use bump maps for a pseudo 3d effect.  Now place your figure.  Replicate it and place it where else you may need it.  If you need to produce a number of them in formation, use multireplicate and the perhaps the randomize settings from the functions.  Repeat with the rest of the pre rendered images.  Make certain that they all face dead on into the camera, or the illusion will fail.

Then add your foreground figures as you normally would.

As for using P1 and P2 people, I was thinking of the nude one with props added for clothing, armor, and weapons.  In a project that I was woking on before I pause it in favor of the images for the valentine's day exhibition, I was going to need a large number of figures like this also.  Fortunatly most of them are in the distance and are in formation, so I started using the Poser one males this way.  Poser 1 people a very low poly count models, rather ugly, but in the distance they can be useful.

Well here you can find lowpoly female models, don't know about male modles.
http://fast3d.actionbabecentral.com/