John Mervin shows how you can animate thousands of characters in a battle scene using Blender. Blender does have a crowd simulator, but here, John uses Blender’s particle systems. John notes that Blender’s crowd simulator is pretty basic at the moment, and he has achieved better results from instancing animated particles.

John shows how you can hack together a battle scene that has lots of characters that fight each other on the battlefield. Is it perfect method? Attmitedly, John is the first to state not — but with some work, you could get pretty great results.