Oh, this may well be the rabbit hole from which I will NEVER emerge...  Sigh.

Here's my sample using my own characters and animations (both from Mixamo).  It is distressingly easy to add your own characters and animations to Anima, which makes it all the more likely I will never see the light of day anymore.

In this clip the first zombie cop has his feet wrong -- apparently a lot (all?) of Mixamo rigs come in this way, but luckily it's easy to adjust and I did on the second one, which has a zombie animation added to one of the Anima characters.  The only drawback/problem I see so far is that walking animations (ones that follow paths) have rules that prevent some (most?) animations from working with them (they require four steps, which makes sense I guess in that they require one last step to move along that path.  This isn't a deal breaker for those animations you can edit, but since I was hoping to just use some canned ones AND since I don't have the full version of XChange to completely edit things it might cause a problem.  Then again, I can always break out Max or Motionbuilder if I'm feeling a need to add a lot of my own walking stuff).

WAY too much fun.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Ah crap.  I found out how to get your custom walks to loop inside of Anima.

I am NEVER going to have a life anymore.  Why didn't this stuff come out when I was younger (and/or working, so I could fool around at work with it :>).  This is God's way of not allowing me to get any more sun.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I hear you KT. Slightly different issues in my case, but yeah, the rabbit hole is deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! ;)

I do hope to one day see tools like this right in iClone.

Even if RL doesn't want to create these tools it would be nice if they could work with AXYZ to add plug-in support for this, like it's available for Max, Cinema 4D and something else which escapes me at the moment.  The obvious shortcut would be not to have to use XChange to convert these (and, truthfully, the only thing that worries me is that XChange will bump up against some memory constraints -- that's the one thing I can't really test well before I purchase, although I am going to try adding as many characters as I can just to see).

And, yes, ALL of this stuff, great iClone 7 stuff (not to mention the 7.1 things which REALLY interest me, and which got me back into iClone in the first place) are ways of diverting our interest from Real Life.  The good news in my case is that I AM retired, with time on my hands, but the bad news is I am in no way young enough to have the years left I want.  Still, I'm SO happy I've lived long enough to see all this.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I was able to import a pretty big crowd when I used the 4 Gig patch. Yes, it does work with the latest 3DX as well ;) It took forever, but it was a huge crowd. Remember that your files will be bigger if you can save more than 4 seconds. So in Anima use 12 FPS, and export your textures at "very low" resolution.
http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

You just run it from wherever you unzipped it and select the application that needs patching from the dialog it opens. It even makes a backup for you.

@Kellytoons: The 4GB patch can be applied to any 32-bit program run in a 64-bit OS environment. Get it here: http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php. It changes a flag, so that 32-bit programs can go beyond the regular 2-GB limit allotted to them under a 32-bit OS. Just saw Rampa answered that already. One can't take a nap around here...:doze:

With "the whole group" I mean the group that was loaded when I first opened Anima Lite. To that I added one clothed model.

@Rampa: There were maybe 3 or 4 women and the rest men. I will give details later. These are the scantily clad models (looking like clay) that have more polys than the clothed models provided in Anime Lite.

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The only problem I have had so far is crashing in iClone 7. It's not a memory problem as far as I can tell, so it remains a mystery.

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Thanks to both of you (and Ani, forget that PM then).  I've downloaded the patch (why oh why isn't XChange 7 64 bit?  It's like something out of the 60's, that program).

I tested out a sample with around 100 actors and it worked well, and they were high res, so even if I had to lower the res I suspect I could load a few hundred in (MORE than enough for me).  Don't (so far) have any problems in 7 but you never know.  Hope it won't crash things, but I'm willing to take a chance because Anima just is SO spectacular for this kind of stuff (you can create path sections where folks act differently, so I have a "zombie turning" section that looks spectacular -- even if I never do anything other than crowds in iClone I'll have fun :>).

I hope the OP is getting *some* ideas here.  I could see this as working for major battle scenes even if you had to break it up into sections (so importing a few hundred at a time).

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

I love that 4GB patch - been using it for eons & it definitely makes a big difference...

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iClone Certified Content Developer and Author of the Pinky Frink® Adventure Series & the Pinky Frink® Learning Books
site: Granny J's 3D Attic SKYPE = grannyjsplace email: grannyj@grannyjs3dattic.com
MY RIG: GPU: Dual GeForce GTX 970M | CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)i7-5930K @3.50GHz| 32.00 GB RAM | OS: Win 7 Pro SP1 | DX11

A great, and free, resource for populating your crowds with low-medium res characters is Makehuman. The user community has created a lot of assets for it now.

http://www.makehumancommunity.org
http://www.makehumancommunity.org/content/user_contributed_assets.html