Recreating multiple instances of an animation

[videorat]

Hello,

I am currently animating a wind generator which which will have 3 moving parts. For the final video, the environment will be created in VUE6 xStream. The problem that I am running into is I don't know how to copy the models and animations so I can have a ton of moving wind generators.

Does anyone know an easy way create this. I was thinking of animating every single wind generator but it would take forever.

Thanks ahead of time.

[Scazzino]

HD Instance (http://www.happy-digital.com/instance2.asp)... ;)

[toby]

Animate one generator ( in an empty scene ) and save the scene. Then do a "Load from Scene" and bring the scene into itself, giving you two animated generators. Move one of them to one side, and alter it's animation slightly with "Shift Keys" and/or "Scale Keys" in the classic scene editor. Save the scene, then "load from scene" it into itself again. Now you'll have 4 generators, this time select two of them and do another "shift keys" and/or "scale keys".

Repeat this 3 more times ( but after you have 8 don't bother to alter the animations ) and you'll have 64 of them -

[Cageman]

Another trick, that may end up even faster, is to create a master null for the generator (so that everything related to the generator is parented to this null) and use Clone Hiearchy with the masternull selected. What happens is that it clones the null as well as EVERYTHING underneath it, with animation intact. It can be somewhat buggy with bones or joints, but it seems to handle items just fine (and if there aren't too many of them).