Poor manS massive grinD

So I've finally come to shot #1098 and his pals 1099,1100,1101,1002 and 1004... these are the biggest "crowd" shots of the film OR what can I say I like armies marching into battle ^ ^ So I've been screwing around with techniques to do this for awhile now... only a few of the closer shots need actual 3d models in the scene... I did these 2 shots last night... To make things faster I stripped out the rig from the character, deleted all expressions and morphs... and set up the charS geometry hierarchy so I could animate it with FK... created a spline path for them to walk on... put the 4 different soldier types in a Mograph cloner set to object mode and turned on the automatic animation magickal switch to make them move along teh path... I used a random effector with a small time offset of 3 frames to add some variation to the march... NOW it almost kILLED my pc to do a test still render ^ ^ The characters are about 8000 polys each and there like 250 of them... NOW it wouldn't have been as taxing on the memory if I has been using render instances BUT the characters are holding torches with flickering visible lights in them and render instances dont work with lights...I know I could have baked the lighting into the characters BUT for these close ups I wanted real interactive lighting and shadows... I might have to end up rendering it in passes... those shots are next in line in the queue so I'll see whether they can render or not...

For the rest of the long shots I'll just render image sequences of the chaRs walking in place and put them on cards...thats Much easier on yer system and work isn't as SLOW as instancing teh 3d geometry...

So now I start the part where some d00d has to fight this whole army ^ ^