How to Build a Big Set. 3d Animation. (Part 4 – Replication tips). You need to read this!

Replication is a fantastic way of keeping your file size (and therefore overall responsiveness of your scene) low.

In my example scene much of the scene is in fact replicated.

I use a third party plug in from inagoni.com called replica.

In the video I take one of my simple models (a palasade railing) and replicate it. What makes this replicator so useful is that once youve made the replicas you can move them and rotate them independantly.

In fact you can change the shader independantly. I just apply a colour to the same texture (as a multipler) and now my one object can have multiple colours.

Combine the technique of cutting out the middle of models with replication and you have the ability to create a large scene!

Where it gets tricky is with complex objects (high polygon count), even with replication the scene responsiveness can slow down quite a bit with things like trees and bushes.

I therefore recommend that you work on the individual models in the scene as seperate scene files (saving off many “work in progress” versions, just in case you corrupt a file in some way).

Later in the project you can merge these scenes together (although I wouldn’t add trees and bushes until much later, and i certainly wouldnt add characters until the last minute).

Hope this helps! Let me know your thoughts.

Steve