Story Start (nsfw!)
Flames | Chapter Start
Flames | Page 09
Flames | Page 11

No, I didn't make a mistake in the first frame there...

I fiddled with that first shot a fair bit. Key to it, and many of the next pages, is a specially designed script for ordering instances of meshes and tracking positions as characters move through a line. It's quite flexible, with various parameters to define things like the personal space characters want, a variable psuedo-random "jitter" to their position to give them some life, another jitter factor so they're not all aimed directly ahead, and even an override to make them all look at the same thing. Many of these parameters are configured based on a shot ID, composed of a page number and a frame number, with the ability to define a default value on a page if a specific frame is not defined, as well as a default if no page is defined either. All this plugs into a psuedo-random number generator seeded variably by either the shot ID, or the shot ID plus a line position ID (or maybe some others, I forget lol) to allow me to always get the same result when I regenerate the line for a given shot. Assuming the code and other parameters weren't changed, anyways. That in particular was invaluable for planning as it allows me to work around Maya's egregious memory leaks when dealing with this kind of vast, complex scene and PyMel in general. More over, it saves me a ton of hard drive space. I can even ensure that the same (randomly assigned) background Lapsa colors and body type stay with the same individual as they move foward in the line!