> Most of the "scenes" will be OK with minimal movement; some walking, a few
> waving arms, things like that.  I have some creative license, so I can 
> choose
> which ones I want to target, and I'll be focusing on ones that let me 
> reuse
> assets (characters and scenery).

Well this does all sound like what POV-Person does, so long as you're not 
too fussy about the quality of the anatomical models (built using a 
combination of meshes, CSG and Blobs).

It has a crowd generation macro that can generate random people standing 
around in the background (it can position them on a surface for you). The 
animation cycles can be applied to any one of a range of different 
characters and there are options for randomly varying the body shapes. It 
generates some rudimentary items of clothing (using a very limited set of 
macros) and hair (also from a limited set). It even has a pose interpolation 
algorithm so you can manually define two poses (or use two of the predefined 
poses) and generate an intermediate pose or animation (e.g. a hand wiggling 
about).

It's all controlled through POV-Ray SDL macros and variables though, so 
you'd need to learn about how it works from the documentation and examples 
and I don't have any evidence that anyone has ever managed to do that. Also 
I never got round to combining the animation and crowd control options into 
a single example scene, so adding animation to a crowd would require a bit 
of study.

One potential option is to use POV-Person to auto-generate a crowd of 
stationary people standing around in the background (see the examples in the 
download and in the documentation) and punctuate with occasional animated 
character, plus hand-crafted foreground characters converted from Poser or 
another modeller. The disadvantage is , of course, that you'd end up having 
to learn something about both techniques.

Regards,
Chris B.

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