Mass Population: Plausible and Practical Crowd Simulation

This chapter describes how to populate a game environment with a crowd of virtual people. It describes the origins of crowd simulation, approaches taken by those in academic research, and provides practical guidelines on how to create your own crowd for your virtual environment. Research in human crowd animation can be divided into four groups: path planning/positional techniques, selection of example motions, physical simulation, and interpolation of example motions. The chapter looks at the high-density autonomous crowds (HiDAC) model for local planning and collision avoidance and snap-together motions to animate the characters.