Seriously, where are all the zebras?

@Scpx  
Zebras may came from faraway land (just like ponies) but they were living in Everfree Forest and Zecora never said that he’s not born in Equestria.

@Background Pone #0000  
She’s from Alpha Centauri… in our universe.

@Background Pone #0000  
Either Graham’s Number Light Universe Lifespans; or 7,215km but they’re at war, Equestria is losing horribly because the only royal guards with a positive IQ are Peppermint Mocha, Altus Bastion, Specialist Sunflower, Flash Sentry, and Shining Armor and Celestia is denying zebras and the war because she’s so friendship-focused she wants to pretend war doesn’t exist.

Just how far from home IS Zecora?

Don’t worry a zebra will join them and become the seventh student ala starlight glimmer lol

@Background Pony #1E2B  
I like toonboom in fanmade stuff but for me the mlp movie was off because im used to flashmade mlp movies and episodes

@Scpx  
So witch one is true? Or are both. They lived in the everfree and moved to the faraway land and zecora moved back.

@orbsah  
According to the ninth episode of the show, they come from “a faraway land”, iirc.

According to Journal of Two Sisters Zebras are natives of Equestria and lived within Everfree Forest.

Don’t care.

and we should care why?

@Background Pony #66F2  
Reorganizing after the fall of the Storm King.

Who cares about zebras! Where are my anthros? Like those from g1.

@Wiimeiser  
The movie was made in Toonboom so maybe we can use that as a comparison. And if we’re looking for something on a smaller scale (due to budgets and all), DuoCartoonist used Toonboom for their The Moon Rises animation and it still looked really pretty.

@Background Pony #1E2B  
MLP hasn’t updated its version of Flash since 2000, if memory serves. Wait, was Flash even around in 2000?
 
And what about Toonboom? How does that compare?

@Frustration in Excelsis  
@Ferrotter  
And to think I’ve spoken with people who want future Gens of MLP to stick with Flash even though it’s outdated and is currently holding the series back.

@Malvolio  
Onem ore time with more edge,please

@OneOverTwo
 
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 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.

@Ferrotter  

 
Well frankly that sounds like a great idea.

@Wiimeiser  

 
It’s not a hard number, but depends on the complexity of the scene, how many attachment points the objects have to each other, and the amount of memory in the computer running it. The problem is that memory needs go up much faster than the number of objects, so while for example a very simple computer with 1 unit of memory can generate simple scenes, and a powerful computer with 2 units of memory can generate complex scenes, it turns out that a super-powerful computer with 4 units of memory can only generate slightly more complex scenes than the one with 2 units of memory. So you can’t just add memory and faster processors; the more you do it, the less and less help it becomes. At some point you just have to re-use objects in place of unique objects to reduce the effective complexity of the scene, or redo the storyboard to simplify the scene.
 
@OneOverTwo  

 
If you mean duplicate a single cow student to replace a single pony student everywhere he was duplicated, I think that would stick out like a sore thumb. With ponies, there are a lot of them. The duplicated ones blend in. A bunch of ponies and one set of three or four cows doing the exact same thing in unison would, I think, look awful. It would be very obvious that the four obvious cows are obviously the same cow. You’d have to make it a school of cows with one or two token ponies to blend the cows in.

…yet

@Ferrotter  
I disagree.  
(What if there’s more than one cow student then?)

@Wiimeiser  
I don’t think all Zebra have to rhyme but the Journal of Two Sisters implied that it might be common in their society.

@Wiimeiser  
It’s as simple as adding wings to a model. Don’t make up conspiracies.