Simplifying Avatars
 

I finally got my avatars walking in my scene. I recorded paths and let them walk along it with many randomly chosen variables, to let it look like they walk themselves.
But the next problem is the rendering time. With 200 avatars in the scene, the Cull-time is very high. Are there simpler versions of avatars I can use, so the rendertime is shortened and framerate increases?

Try looking on the web for avatar models that fit your super low polly needs. Model dealers like www.turbosquid.com are a good place to start.

there is a new product that WorldViz is going to introduce shortly which is called "Vizard Complete Characters". this is a collection of 100 different characters which are each modeled in 3 different poly counts. this makes it possible to easily make a project containing a 'crowd' of avatars as the polycount for the avatars can be greatly reduced with distance.
"Vizard Complete Characters" sells for $3199 for the full package of 100 different avatars which also includes the complete 3DMax files etc.. Marketing material can be provided upon request and will be on the webpage shortly. For more info, please contact sales@worldviz.com.

Thanks for the info, but that's a bit expensive for me :)
I'll try to find something on the web.

By default, Avatars are updated every frame. This update involves recalculating the entire mesh of the avatar. This is why your cull time is so high. There is an option in Vizard that will control how often an avatar is updated. Example:So you can try modifying the update rate of the avatars based on how far they are from the viewer. For example, avatars that are very far away can be updated less often, since the animations are less noticable. Try playing around with this setting, you should get a significant speed increase.

Thanks! This helps to increase framerate!