Simulation, Animation and Rendering of Crowds in Real-Time
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Date
2014-12-11
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Abstract
Nowadays crowd simulation is becoming more important in computer applications
such as building evacuation planning, training, videogames, etc., presenting
hundreds or thousands of agents navigating in virtual environments. Some
of these applications need to run in real time in order to offer complete interaction
with the user. Simulated crowds should seem natural and give a good
looking impression to the user. The goal should be to produce both the best
motion and animation, while minimizing the awkwardness of movements and
eliminating or hiding visual artifacts. Achieving simulation, animation and
rendering of crowds in real-time becomes thus a major challenge. Although
each of these areas has been studied individually and improvements have been
made in the literature, its integration in one real-time system is not straight forward.
In the process of integrating animation, simulation and rendering of real
time crowds, we need to assume some trade-offs between accuracy and quality
of results.
The main goal of this thesis is to work on those three aspects of a real-time
crowd visualization (simulation, animation and rendering) seeking for possible
speed-ups and optimizations allowing us to further increase the number
of agents in the simulation, to then integrate them in a real-time system, with
the maximum number possible of high quality and natural looking animated
agents. In order to accomplish our goal we present new techniques to achieve
improvements in each one of these areas: In crowd simulation we work on a
multi-domain planning approach and on planning using footsteps instead of
just root velocities and positions; in animation we focus on a framework to eliminate
foot sliding artifacts and on synthesizing motions of characters to follow
footsteps; in rendering we provide novel techniques based on per joint impostors.
Finally we present a novel framework to progressively integrate different
methods for crowd simulation, animation and rendering. The framework offers
level-of-detail for each of these areas, so that as new methods are integrated
they can be combined efficiently to improve performance.
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