This book provides a deep understanding of state-of-art methods for simulation of heterogeneous crowds in computer graphics. It will cover different aspects that are necessary to achieve plausible crowd behaviors. The book will be a review of the most recent literature in this field that can help professionals and graduate students interested in this field to get up to date with the latest contributions, and open problems for their possible future research. The chapter contributors are well known researchers and practitioners in the field and they include their latest contributions in the different topics required to achieve believable heterogeneous crowd simulation. Provides crowd simulation methodology to populate virtual environments, for video games or any kind of applications that requires believable multi-agent behavior Presents the latest contributions on crowd simulation, animation, planning, rendering and evaluation with detailed algorithms for implementation purposes Includes perspectives of both academic researchers and industrial practitioners with reference to open source solutions and commercial applications, where appropriate

This book provides a deep understanding of state-of-art methods for simulation of heterogeneous crowds in computer graphics. It will cover different aspects that are necessary to achieve plausible crowd behaviors. The book will be a review of the most recent literature in this field that can help professionals and graduate students interested in this field to get up to date with the latest contributions, and open problems for their possible future research. The chapter contributors are well known researchers and practitioners in the field and they include their latest contributions in the different topics required to achieve believable heterogeneous crowd simulation. Provides crowd simulation methodology to populate virtual environments, for video games or any kind of applications that requires believable multi-agent behavior Presents the latest contributions on crowd simulation, animation, planning, rendering and evaluation with detailed algorithms for implementation purposes Includes perspectives of both academic researchers and industrial practitioners with reference to open source solutions and commercial applications, where appropriate

Path planning and navigation are indispensable components for controlling autonomous agents in interactive virtual worlds. Given the growing demands on the size and complexity of modern virtual worlds, a number of new techniques have been developed for achieving intelligent navigation for the next generation of interactive multi-agent simulations. This book reviews the evolution of several related techniques, starting from classical planning and computational geometry techniques and then gradually moving toward more advanced topics with focus on recent developments from the work of the authors. The covered topics range from discrete search and geometric representations to planning under different types of constraints and harnessing the power of graphics hardware in order to address Euclidean shortest paths and discrete search for multiple agents under limited time budgets. The use of planning algorithms beyond path planning is also discussed in the areas of crowd animation and whole-body motion planning for virtual characters.

This volume presents novel computational models for representing digital humans and their interactions with other virtual characters and meaningful environments. In this context, we describe efficient algorithms to animate, control, and author human-like agents having their own set of unique capabilities, personalities, and desires. We begin with the lowest level of footstep determination to steer agents in collision-free paths. Steering choices are controlled by navigation in complex environments, including multi-domain planning with dynamically changing situations. Virtual agents are given perceptual capabilities analogous to those of real people, including sound perception, multi-sense attention, and understanding of environment semantics which affect their behavior choices. The roles and impacts of individual attributes, such as memory and personality are explored. The animation challenges of integrating a number of simultaneous behavior and movement demands on an agent are addressed through an open source software system. Finally, the creation of stories and narratives with groups of agents subject to planning and environmental constraints culminates the presentation.

Research in virtual human simulation has seen a dramatic rise in recent years with widespread applicability in games, visual effects, education and urban simulations. Going forward, the problems we face are three-fold: First, a unified framework for efficiently simulating functional, purposeful autonomous virtual humans is yet to be realized. Second, it is particularly challenging to evaluate massive simulations of autonomous agents. Third, there exists no appropriate interface to allow end-users to author complex interactions between autonomous actors that populate the simulated environment. This book addresses the aforementioned challenges and presents a general framework for authoring, animating and, evaluating autonomous virtual human simulations.