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"[@OneOverTwo":](/1702197#comment_7044483

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In theory it does, but the you'd have to come up with a reason for why a species that hasn't had more than a token presence in the show suddenly makes up the majority of the school, which probably wouldn't be worth the narrative trouble.


 
You could, I suppose, use models for dragons, griffons, changelings, etc. to fill out the background with a lot of different species, but the issue of duplicates standing out crops up again -- when every member of the crowd is the same species, it's easy for duplicates and recolors to blend in. If you have a half a dozen or more species in the crowd, then the actual numbers of individuals of each species in the crowd cannot be very large, since the maximum number of background characters you can have on screen at a time hasn't changed. This would make masking the fact that you're reusing the same few models over and over again much more difficult, especially with creatures as physically diverse as dragons -- a duplicate dragon would be very obvious, and you can't just recolor them. This is probably also why scenes set in the dragon lands tend to have sparser/smaller crowds than scenes in Equestria.


 
This strikes me as one of the main limitations of Flash in this context. If (for instance) this had been traditionally animated and each character model was drawn individually, the background crowds could have been more diverse. Of course, this would probably be also much more time-consuming than reusing the same few flash models over and over.

"@OneOverTwo":/1702197#comment_7044483

In theory it does, but the you'd have to come up with a reason for why a species that hasn't had more than a token presence in the show suddenly makes up the majority of the school, which probably wouldn't be worth the narrative trouble.

You could, I suppose, use models for dragons, griffons, changelings, etc. to fill out the background with a lot of different species, but the issue of duplicates standing out crops up again -- when every member of the crowd is the same species, it's easy for duplicates and recolors to blend in. If you have a half a dozen or more species in the crowd, then the actual numbers of individuals of each species in the crowd cannot be very large, since the maximum number of background characters you can have on screen at a time hasn't changed. This would make masking the fact that you're reusing the same few models over and over again much more difficult, especially with creatures as physically diverse as dragons -- a duplicate dragon would be very obvious, and you can't just recolor them. This is probably also why scenes set in the dragon lands tend to have sparser/smaller crowds than scenes in Equestria.

This strikes me as one of the main limitations of Flash in this context. If (for instance) this had been traditionally animated and each character model was drawn individually, the background crowds could have been more diverse. Of course, this would probably be also much more time-consuming than reusing the same few flash models over and over.