Hi guys. I am currently using blender to create some sort of animation of a fantasy style army. Now I know I could simply create a charachter and create a motion cycle, then copy it several hundred times and the set up an animation for each one, but this would take quite a while, is there more of an elegant and less time consuming method, there the army could inefect be randomly generated, mabye with their motion cycles out of sync to add to variety. Note I will be recording this with blender so mabye randomness is not so much of an option! i dont know!

I'm sure you could write a Python script to iterate over the units in your army and apply a small amount of random scaling factor. You could probably also offset the marching in a similar way.

Oh k well can I ask this then. Is there a way I can animate an object without specifying a path. Is there a way to make an object move in a particular direction, and obey the floor to so that its vertical position determined by both the height of the floor and gravity, thanks!

You should buy the blender book.....

Basically there is an editor I believe it is called NLA editor, where u can make poses like wave hand, walk legs, and you can call these at any given frame.

You just copy the hand one and the walk one, and u can have them run together. Its complicated if u dont have a tutorial.

Animate object without a path? u can have it run a walk cycle without moveing, but u can also make it follow a 3d path.