hi guys I am creating an animation with lots of spiders in it running around over some terrain. I've run into a problem when it comes to duplicating the objects.

At the moment I have it setup so that i have three models each with their own animation /ik/geometry etc. And all grouped together:

e.g. spiderGroup1, spiderGroup2, spiderGroup3.

Now what I want to do is select a random one of those and duplicate it so that I have another one (which then gets it's keyframe xyz translations and rotations loaded in via MEL). The models and animation are quite simple and only last for 200 frames at the moment.

The problem I get is that after about 40 duplications maya starts to fall over and die eventually crashing into a pile of 0's and 1's and begging for mercy

Is there a simpler way of doing this? maybe instancing? maybe referencing? or even dummy objects that are replaced at rendertime with the correct ones? or even using readArchive() from PRman to load up the animation at rendertime?

Please any help with this would be fantastic


Alan