Construction animation, Instances arrays and RE:lays... Help needed

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi i’m currently working on a complex animation of a building constructing, and was looking for some advice.

I Have created an animation of a wall “building” it self, I now wish to reuse this section of the wall in 100s of instances to create corridors etc , preferably with a slight time offset. Need less to say the animation currently is made of multiple objects keyframed.
I guess I need to make these objects act as one object, is there a way of grouping it or is there away to use mdd point cache?

And then something like the array tool? with a time offset? I 've no idea… So any suggestions would be super helpful.

I’ve posted a shot of the wall animating here so you can get a a better Idea.
http://youtu.be/zJqHEnbBuMo

2

There’s no simple way of doing this…

Option 1:
You could copy the wall, and shift all its objects’ keyframes forwards or backwards in the dopesheet, but this will get very complicated as you get multiple versions of the wall

Option 2:
This will take some re-working, but if re-created the wall as a single object plus an armature to animate it, then you could make different copies of this objects and slide their individual actions around in the NLA editor.

Option 3:
THe new wall is several different objects, parented to bones on an armature, which is animated. This action is moved forward and backward in the NLA editor to stagger the motion between the walls.