Populating virtual environments with crowd patches and rule-based method

Creating a lively virtual world is a hot topic tracked by many computer scientists. In this paper, we present a technique for designing and populating virtual environments in real time. The population is composed of many blocks containing a pre-computed local crowd simulation. Each block is called a crowd patch. Patches may contain static objects, moving objects, animals and pedestrians. The content of a patch can be constructed to meet various environments. By saving and re-using crowd patches the computation needs for building a virtual crowd is reduced. As for the special case that two or three people walk together, which has not been proposed in crowd patches, we use rule-based method to control the motion. We discuss issues that arise in designing crowd patches, algorithms for computing local motions, and solutions for simulating walking companions. At last, a city street with many pedestrians is created by assembling crowd patches.

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