Hi guys n gals

quick question - what is the best way to do large crowd simulations in max? by large i mean 100,000 plus people

is it the built in simulation? a 3rd party plugin? if so which one? or will i need to spend thousands of dollars on a maya/massive/renderman system?

advice would be gratefully received

thanks in advance

It all depends on the factors of how close you want to view the crowd, and how detailed the textures you make are. If you are going to view the crowd from far away, make simple, low-poly spheres for heads (if the crowd is all humans), and slightly subdivided cylinders or boxes for limbs, torso, fingers, and toes. I know i’m not the best at making textures and UV maps yet, but maybe you could use photos of the objects or characters you need, from the front and side, as refererence and textures for the models. Use a bump map or displacement map for more detail with the photo UV maps or materials as textures if you are going to zoom in close to the crowd. I also reccomend using high resolution photos or textures, I don’t mean like 512 x 512 images, but higher, and the sizes must be in a power of 2. You might (and I might too!) have to look up what numbers are powers of 2.

Hope that helps

Edit: By the way, I am a teen gal, and not a guy. Just putting that out there, so no one thinks i’m a guy who likes a blue flower as their avatar.