I got all my 14 characters assembled, I thought, on the stage where they'd be practicing, and then realized they were feet above it! I had hoped that if tagged fall to floor they'd come near but ground/floor is feet below the virtual "stage'. is there a way to simplify this process?

drawn

Pressing Ctrl+D will lower the figure to the Ground plane, but you'll need to manually adjust the Y-Translate dial to position it on the stage. Alternatively, you can enable collision and set specific body or clothing parts to interact with the stage. However, you may not have the required skills to utilize this feature.

Additionally, your scene contains a significant number of figures. If they are not on billboard planes, Poser's render engine may face difficulties rendering the scene efficiently. Have you attempted a render yet?

I agree that number of people might not render well. I have done more, but it takes some tricks. If you can't get it rendered, let us know.

I did attempt a render, and it flopped. how do I put characters on a "billboard plane?"

thanks,

don

so I pasted three figures on background but they didn't work because scene still there. Then I did cmd+g and the stage disappeared. did I lower the stage to meet the level of the Ground? if so, seems like a mess. what would you do given this setup?

Saving your scene before rendering is crucial. If you haven't, then it's a lesson in the importance of backing up your work. Should you need to begin anew, you can reload the scene into Poser. Overloading your scene with figures can lead to rendering issues. Consider that each character's clothing counts as separate figures. With 12 characters dressed in tops and bottoms, you're essentially trying to render 36 figures, excluding hair. To manage this, you could either use billboard figures for the background or render in layers and composite in an application like Photoshop. Each section would still need to be rendered separately for later composition. Another strategy is to reduce file size overhead by using low-resolution textures and figures as background fillers. Implementing these methods requires careful planning and meticulous rendering for a satisfactory outcome. By the way, you didn't specify which rendering engine you're using.

To create a billboard, you would render each figure individually. You would then put that on a plane with a transparency. You then replace the figures in the scene. 

wow, complex stuff. and I appreciate how important it is to know how to create a crowded scene, as, an audience...thanks, Red!

drawn

superfly mostly.

One of the easiest ways to render a crowd is to not render a crowd. Render small groups. You might want to save an extra copy of the scene. Then in the new scene, delete all but a manageable group of people. Render the portion of the scene they're in. Save that render. Reload the scene to restore the deleted people. Keep another group and delete the rest, and render. Once you have each group rendered, paste them together in your favorite 2d program, Photoshop, Gimp, etc

In this scene, I might divide them up like this.

Depending on your hardware, you might be able to get away with 2 or 3 groups only

Impressive!