Crowds (and research in animation and games)

CSE 3541Matt Boggus

Foundation of Digital Games

• See site for paper topics

CASA – computer animation and social agents

• Social Agents and Avatars• Emotion and Personality• Virtual Humans• Autonomous Actors• AI-based Animation• Social and Conversational Agents• Inter-Agent Communication• Social Behavior• Crowd Simulation• Understanding Human Activity• Memory and Long-term Interaction, etc.

SCA – symposium on computer animation• 2D, 3D, and N-D animation systems• autonomous characters• clothing animation and simulation• expressive motion / communication• facial animation• group and crowd behavior• intuitive interfaces for creating and editing animations• mathematical foundations of animation• methods of control and artistic direction of simulations• nature in motion (natural phenomena, plants, clouds, ...)• new time-based art forms on the computer• novel time-varying phenomena• perceptual metrics for animation• perceptual foundations of animation• physical realism / measuring the real world for animation• physical simulation• fluid animation• planning / learning / optimization for animation• real-time and interactive methods• camera control methods for computer animation• sound and speech for animation

I3D – symposium on interactive 3D graphics and games• Interaction devices and techniques • 3D game techniques • Interactive modeling • Level-of-detail approaches • Pre-computed lighting • Visibility computation • Real-time surface shading • Fast shadows, caustics and reflections • Imposters and image-based techniques • Animated models • GPU techniques • Navigation methods • Interactive visualization • Virtual and augmented reality • User studies of interactive techniques and applications • Sketch based 3D interaction

Siggraph

See http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/sig2013.html

Crowd modeling applications

Entertainment: Games Computer animation ArtEvaluation: Architecture RoboticsTraining: Virtual reality simulation

Individuals and crowds

•Individuals are agents– Reactive vs. planning– Goal vs. need driven

•Groups – set of similar agents– Spatially close– Like minded (butter-side up or butter-side down)

•Crowds – many individuals, with or without groups– Emergent behavior – similar to flocking, flocking system– Uniformity – sameness of members– Quantity & density – average distance between members

Execution environment

• Real-time / Interactive– Simple computations– Avoid n2

or higher algorithms– Limit size

• Off-line– Can use complex models for behavior– Can allow interaction between all agents (n2)– Size limited only by hardware memory and storage

Example 1

Autonomous PedestriansEmulating real pedestrians in urban environmentsMotions controlled at different levels– Reactive behaviors– Navigational and motivational behaviors– Cognitive behaviors

Information stored in mental stateshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqG7ADSvQ5o

Example 2

Autonomous Pedestrians Controlling Agents in High-Density Crowd Simulation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsbChtHmwfA&feature=related

Spatial organization

Cellular decomposition:Regular 2D gridAdjacency accessibleDensity limitedCells define obstructions

Continuous space:Step in any directionNeed to decipher obstructionsPerception needed

Navigation

Rule-based

Fluid flow: density fields, potential functions

Cognitive modeling

Flocking systems: individual perception, navigation

Particle systems:Individual navigation

Cellular automata

Panic & Congestion handling

Personal space

Packing people during evacuation

Exit awareness

Motion & Navigation

Potential fields

Path planning

Passing on pathways

Roadmaps

Forming & maintaining subgroups

Recent papers on crowd simulation

• Simulating Heterogeneous Crowd Behaviors Using Personality Trait Theory http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/personality/

• Environment-aware Real-time Crowd Control http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0967017/crowdcontrol.html

• A Synthetic-Vision-Based Steering Approach for Crowd Simulation http://www.irisa.fr/mimetic/GENS/jpettre/ (scroll down to find paper and video)

Commercial crowd simulation

MASSIVE http://www.massivesoftware.com/

What is Massive? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2VaLD3GWAs&feature=related

LQ1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5pNPJAhsBI

LQ2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXqNO9Yi2ZU&feature=relmfu