3D Visualization and Animation of Crowd Simulation Using a Game Engine

Abstract

Crowd simulation is an essential component of military training and operations. In this paper, we present an approach for generating 3D visualizations and animations from simulation results in the area of agent-based crowd simulation for military operations. The main contribution is to create a simulation bridge between a federated agent-based crowd simulation architecture and a game engine to drive the visualization and animation of virtual crowd in a 3-dimentional space. In our simulation bridge framework, we present a method for data acquisition to create the virtual environment. An interfacing methodology is introduced between the 3D virtual environment maps and the federated agent-based crowd simulator. Our method comprises of converting the 3D maps to multi-level 2D maps to feed the 2D agent-based crowd simulator’s virtual world representation. A tool was implemented for defining objects in the virtual environment based on 2D maps and a color coder scheme. Our bridge framework makes use of a game engine as the visualization medium. The 3D virtual environment maps are reconstructed within the game engine and human avatars are created to simulate the agents. Motion, expression and behavioral animations are attached to each virtual agent. At run-time, data is fed from the 2D crowd simulator to our framework via an event-driven file buffer. Virtual agents are created at run-time based on the social aspects of the crowd composition. Behavioral animation is triggered on each agent based on the commands represented in the simulation results. Our framework also provides visualization of emergency situations and makes use of particle dynamics to generate more realistic visuals of disaster situations and human crowd behavior in an emergency situation.