Abstract
Achieving the efficient rendering of a large animated crowd with realistic visual appearance is a challenging task when players interact with a complex game scene. We present a real-time crowd rendering system that efficiently manages multiple types of character data on the GPU and integrates seamlessly with level-of-detail and visibility culling techniques. The character data, including vertices, triangles, vertex normals, texture coordinates, skeletons, and skinning weights, are stored as either buffer objects or textures in accordance with their access requirements at the rendering stage. Our system preserves the view-dependent visual appearance of individual character instances in the crowd and is executed with a fine-grained parallelization scheme. We compare our approach with the existing crowd rendering techniques. The experimental results show that our approach achieves better rendering performance and visual quality. Our approach is able to render a large crowd composed of tens of thousands of animated instances in real time by managing each type of character data in a single buffer object.
Highlights
Crowd rendering is an important form of visual effects
To achieve a realistic visual approximation of the crowd, each character is usually tessellated with tessellation algorithms [5], which increases the character’s mesh complexity to a sufficient level, so that fine geometric details and smooth mesh deformations can be preserved in the virtual scene
This indicates that the number of triangles in the crowd varies significantly according to the change of instance-camera relationships
Summary
Crowd rendering is an important form of visual effects. In video games, thousands of computer-articulated polygonal characters with a variety of appearances can be generated to inhabit in a virtual scene like a village, a city, or a forest. With the support of hardware-accelerated geometryinstancing and pseudo-instancing techniques [9, 14,15,16], multiple data of a character, including vertices, triangles, textures, skeletons, skinning weights, and animations, can be cached in the memory of a graphics processing unit (GPU). Different from existing instancing techniques, our approach is capable of rendering all different characters through a single buffer object for each type of data.
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