Hi! How should I work with a scene with a lot of elements, like a city scene with moving cars and peoples in it? I’m working this project but in a low poly mesh. I find that its getting harder to manage them. Can I link my elements from outside for this city scene file like the mesh of the people so if I need to do a litter editing on the people I can do it on the people.blender file and it will auto update the people on the scene used. I not such if there is any 3D software that does this so I’m just asking around.
Yes, you can do what you’ve got in mind. And tools are getting better for this all the time, so you probably want to start investigating what 2.43 has to offer soon. I have not worked with proxy objects, which are currently under development (but 2.43 has at least the basic functionality) but you should use those if you have rigged characters that you want to link to from other files.
http://www.blender.org/cms/Proxy_Objects.824.0.html
Other than rigged characters, ordinary linking should do more or less what you want. Also, I believe some improvements in the outliner will make this kind of organization easier in 2.43 than it has been in the past And groups (available in 2.42) are a big help.
Linking works like appending, except that you choose “Link” rather than “Append” when you select the file.
Apart from what bugman has said, another useful technique is multipass rendering, particularly layer passes
Very interesting. Is this a real world Blender 2.42a feature or a maybe Blender 2.43 feature?
Because at the moment I’m putting everything in layers. As in different lights in different layers with different objects in those particular layers. Ha, ha, ha.
How do I use this proxy objects? are there any other tutorials on it?
No tutorials on it at this point. There’s the link I posted, which tells you the basics, and there’s this thread, with a little discussion:
How do i get this Proxy Objects to work and what is “library linked Object”? I pushed the Ctrl + Alt + P but nothing happen.
you can also use linked scenes for really big scenes; have the terra in one (trees, surface, roads), buildings in another, and link them as you create them.
How do i really link them together? Is it on the file > Append > select the blender files. ?
Ok I think I got the linking to work. Did not read the last part by Bugman 2000. I tried to link import a group of mesh ( Human ) but the mesh does not stay as a group but as an individual object. Can this be done?
Well doing linking of object in to a animation scene speed up the rendering process and work process as more and more objects are added?
Well doing linking of object in to a animation scene speed up the rendering process and work process as more and more objects are added?
No. Rendering gets slower as more verts are in the scene, no matter what.
So It does not matter even if the objects are all referenced to one object file? Just a question on how would a designer go about creating a big city scene with peoples, cars, animation… on a Pentium 4, 2.8 GHz and 1.99GB of ram? How would you work on this projects?
It’s a pitty JamesK (forget his name now, Kaufeld?) isn’t around anymore. He use to do some amazingly complex scenes with very little in a file. He would render out (let’s say) a city, or just use pics, and UVMap them to a Plane or a set of Cubes with Alpha Maps. Same with the mountains in the background. Or he’d render out a street scene with the camera zooming left to right and add that as a Sequence strip. Then use the same Camera View and animation to put the car in the scene so the street is an AlphaOver’d Strip running behind the car. When the car turns the corner a UVMapped cube pops onto the rendered layer and a new Sequence Strip kicks in of the street coming towards you and once you’ve turned the corner it’s just UVMapped Planes with very little modelling, Alpha Mapped trees and parked cars.
I don’t think he ever did a street scene but that’s the kind of technique; everything that seemed so complex was just good texturing and I remember him saying once that if it was taking too long he just slapped it on so he could get it done and move on to the next one. His genius, what made things really work, was how he used the Camera. The angles he shot at and the time a camera spent on a particular part of the anim was always just enough to give you the full picture of what was going on and not enough time or field of view to see anything he didn’t want you to see. The people on the sidewalk would be doing a walkcycle but not moving and you wouldn’t notice because you’re watching the car, and going by them so fast made them look like they were moving anyhow. Mostly his humanoid ‘extras’ were built with spheres and cylinders just Ctrl-J’d, no nose or ears and such waste of time. And he did it all in Blender 1.8, 2.21 and 2.23/25 !
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Must be nice to be that intuitive and have the skill to keep things simple yet effective 
Here’s a nice example.
Finished product:
http://www.enricovalenza.com/anpeng.html
Behind the scenes:
http://www.enricovalenza.com/makepeng.html