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Crowd Simulation

Crowd simulation for virtual environments offers many challenges centered on the trade-offs between rich behavior, control and computational cost. In this paper we present a new approach to controlling the behavior of agents in a crowd. Our method is scalable in the sense that increasingly complex crowd behaviors can be created without a corresponding increase in the complexity of the agents. Our approach is also more authorable; users can dynamically specify which crowd behaviors happen in various parts of an environment. Finally, the character motion produced by our system is visually convincing. We achieve our aims with a situation-based control structure. Basic agents have very limited behaviors. As they enter new situations, additional, situation-specic behaviors are composed on the y to enable agents to respond appropriately. The composition is done using a probabilistic mechanism. We demonstrate our system with three environments including a city street and a theater.


Mankyu Sung, Michael Gleicher and Stephen Chenney, Scalable behaviors for Crowd Simulation , Computer Graphics Forum 23, 3(2004) (Eurographics '04).

EG-Talk slides
Demo:Simple Composable behaviors (Microsoft MPEG 4).
Demo:Street Environment (Microsoft MPEG 4).
Demo:Gallery Environment (Microsoft MPEG 4).
Demo:On-line situations (Microsoft MPEG 4).
Demo:painting interfaces (Microsoft MPEG 4).
EG Video (Microsoft MPEG 4).



Other info

Questions/Comments: mksung@cs.wisc.edu