Modeling a scene with a lot of objects
 

Well I'm starting to work on a possible animation and there is going to be a lot involved in this one. I've got the ideas in my head and started writing them down in a story board fashion without the pictures because I can't draw too well, but I might attempt it anyway.

The scenes are going to be in a house, main character and his dog getting ready to go to the local park to play. They will then leave the house, walk down the street to the park, where there is a playground (slides, ladders, monkey bars, large sandbox, bleachers, swing set, fence, and a huge field). Oh and also a ball, which is modeled after my dogs favorite ball.

All of this is quite large, or going to be anyway, and I was wondering can I model all of this in the same project scene or would separating the house from the outside walk down the street and the playground all in different scenes and just import the characters into each scene as I need them?

I'm figuring when it comes time to animate the scenes I'll probably have to render in layers anyway so that's what made me wonder if I should make it all one scene or not.

i would suggest modelling everything in the same scene but render in separated layers, your house in a different layer your characters in a different one etc etc then composite everything in a software like Nuke or after effects or apple shake.

but if you're wanting to model everything in different scenes tho, you can then open your main scene and import everything as references, File - Reference Editor....then in that window File - Create Reference.

this won't change the file size, your main file will still be heavy, but you will just have more control over everything.

be aware though, this could be either a bad or a good thing, for example if your main scene is the house one and you reference your characters in it, then you go back to your character file and change something to it like your change your characters head it will also be updated in your main scene.


http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/6229/reference.png

another good thing, in the image above if i uncheck HeadRN head.mb anything in that scene will disappear like it was never there, which will also reduce the load of the file

I've never used the reference editor. Sounds pretty interesting though. Thanks for the reply that's very helpful, sound like I could give that a try and if it doesn't work I could then just import everything into one scene.

Let me know how this one goes rhet....I modelled a small scene with a robot and it rendered fine...then I added a couple of chairs and now MR craps itself, or my lappy does?? It was working just fine..then pooof no more render.

cheers bullet

hehe well once I get a bit into it I'm going to start posting the progress in the WIP section. All I've modeled so far is the ball for the dog. Will probably take quite a while to model it all, especially since I'm going to have so much going on, I'll probably be laying out UV's as I model each object, to make it less stressful when all the modeling is done.

I should be getting started on this by the weekend though.

I vill be vatching yu...all ze vay

bullet'