Increasing diversity and usability of crowd animation systems

Abstract

Crowd systems are a vital part in virtual environment applications that are used in entertainment, education, training or different simulation systems such as evacuation planning. Because performance and scalability are key factors, the implementation of crowds poses many challenges in many of its aspects: behaviour simulation, animation, and rendering. This paper is focusing on a different model of animating crowd characters that support dynamically streaming of animation data between CPU and GPU. There are three main aspects that motivate this work. First, we want to provide a greater diversity of animations for crowd agents than was possible before, by not storing any predefined animation data. Another aspect that stems from the first improvement is that this new model allows the crowd simulation side to communicate more efficiently with the animation side by sending events back and forth at runtime, fulfilling this way use-cases that different crowd systems have. Finally, a novel technique implementation that blends between crowd agents’ animations is presented. The results section shows that these improvements are added with negligible cost.