Multiple (same) Armatures & characters.

I’m trying to set up an animation, where there is one protagonist, fighting against a hella bunch (say perhaps 10-20) of soldiers. The aforementioned 10-20 characters will have the same look.

You can see what I’m trying to do in the video below, at somewhere around 2:36 time.

How would you guys approach this?
My idea would be having Alt+D both the armature and object of the soldiers (so I can have them using the same poselibrary, let’s say I’ve set up few poses like kicking and crouching; as well as having all of the same action strips library in their NLA editors). Would that be a feasible approach? Or having them as multi-user meshes would make them impossible to animate differently each soldiers? (as in, all instances of the soldiers will have the same location, position, etc, instead of having them spread out) should I Shift+D instead? I haven’t actually tried this before so I’m not sure what will happen since I want to do research and planning before jumping down to Blender.

What’s the best way to animate all of the soldiers differently using the same armature & object?

bump~

Anybody? D:

I tried to put bunch of character by “Linking” and converting to proxy, Ctrl+Alt+P. But it seems proxy work for one character and not for whole bunch of character copy. If you play action, they all jump back to one location!

Next method is “Append”. Append will work so long as you made key frame action with rotation only. If you use Loc / Rot key frames, and play it, all character will jump back to the same location! Using rotation key framing only, you can stagger action of different character by using NLA editor. That way you can edit action of different character spread over the scene.