This sequence was rendered out of Houdini via it's built-in renderer Mantra. I rendered out normal, beauty, and shadow passes which I composited in Fusion 5.3. I created the gladiator motions in Motionbuilder and let Houdini decide which motion to use via custom attributes. When a gladiator comes into contact with an enemy the motion is setup to switch from a walk sequence to a fighting sequence, and then at some point a death sequence follows. I still have the desire to take this scene to the next level, but I'm considering starting over with a new scene using what I've learned from building this version. Rendering is another issue, I currently only have one machine to feed files to, and this sequence alone took 3 days to render. More progress will be made once I have more computers up and running as a renderfarm.