GPU Tessellation for Detailed, Animated Crowds

In games we frequently see large gatherings of crowds of characters; for example, an army or a rowdy crowd in a stadium. These crowds may seem realistic from a far away view, however, up close this impression fails as the viewer approaches the characters and the illusion of detailed creatures rapidly breaks down. We describe a method for managing level of detail and maintaining high quality rendering of character closeups in massive crowd scenarios using GPU tessellation, instancing and stream out features of DirectX10 R ©. We present a technique to increase the individual character’s animation quality and overall system performance with a two-pass animation approach. We reduce memory bandwidth via shader-based vertex compression and decompression. Lastly, we developed an algorithm minimizing discontinuities across uv seams for displacement mapping.