A Rendering Pipeline for Real-time Crowds

In motion picture movies, large crowds of computer-generated characters are usually included to produce battle scenes of epic proportions. In video games, it is common to find crowds that conform armies controlled by users (or AI) in real-time strategy games, or crowds made of non-player characters (e.g., groups of spectators in a stadium). In virtual environments, it is common to find crowd simulations that interact with other characters and with their surrounding environment. In all cases, optimizations such as level of detail and culling should be performed to render the crowds. In this chapter, we propose a parallel approach (implemented on the GPU) for level of detail selection and view frustum culling, allowing us to render crowds made of thousands of characters.