Geopostors

Simon Dobbyn, John Hamill, Keith O'Conor, Carol O'Sullivan
2005 Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games - SI3D '05  
The simulation of large crowds of humans is important in many fields of computer graphics, including real-time applications such as games, as they can breathe life into otherwise static scenes and enhance believability. We present a novel hybrid rendering system for crowds that solves the classic problem of degraded quality of image-based representations at close distances by building an impostor rendering system on top of a full, geometry-based, human animation system. This enables almost
more » ... ceptible switching between the two representations based on a "pixel to texel" ratio, with minimal popping artefacts. Seamless interchanges are further facilitated by exploiting programmable graphics hardware to efficiently enhance the realism and variety of the dynamically-lit impostors, thereby also improving on existing impostor techniques. To test our system, our virtual crowds are embedded in an urban simulation system (as shown in Figure 1 ). The results demonstrate a system capable of rendering large realistic crowds with the visual realism of a high-resolution geometry rendering system, but at a fraction of the rendering cost.
doi:10.1145/1053427.1053443 dblp:conf/si3d/DobbynHOO05 fatcat:xj7agke5b5athhkkwugqzl7fx4