Impostors and pseudo-instancing for GPU crowd rendering

ABSTRACT

Animated crowds are effective to increase realism in virtual reality applications. However, rendering crowds requires large computational power. In this paper, we present a technique suitable to render large crowds of characters that takes advantage of existing programmable graphics hardware. Impostors are used for low-detail representation, while pseudo-instancing is used for higher detail. A LOD map is used to select between both representations, based on a customizable threshold.

REFERENCES

• 1: ARB. 2003. ARB_point_sprite extension. Tech. rep., OpenGL Architecture Review Board.
• 2: Amaury Aubel , Ronan Boulic , Daniel Thalmann, Animated Impostors for Real-Time Display of Numerous Virtual Humans, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Virtual Worlds, p.14-28, July 01-03, 1998
• 3: De Heras Ciechomski, P., Schertenleib, S., Mam, J., Maupu, D., and Thalmann, D. 2005. Real-time shader rendering for crowds in virtual heritage. In The 6th International Symposium on Virtual Reality, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, Eurographics Association, Pisa, Italy, 91--98.
• 4: Simon Dobbyn , John Hamill , Keith O'Conor , Carol O'Sullivan, Geopostors: a real-time geometry / impostor crowd rendering system, Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, April 03-06, 2005, Washington, District of Columbia [doi>10.1145/1053427.1053443]
• 5: Grossman, J. P., and Dally, W. J. 1998. Point sample rendering. In Rendering Techniques '98, Springer, 181--192.
• 6: Hugues Hoppe, Progressive meshes, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.99-108, August 1996 [doi>10.1145/237170.237216]
• 7: Millán, E., and Rudomín, I. 2006. A comparison between impostors and point-based models for interactive rendering of animated models. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA) 2006, University Press.
• 8: Hanspeter Pfister , Matthias Zwicker , Jeroen van Baar , Markus Gross, Surfels: surface elements as rendering primitives, Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.335-342, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/344779.344936]
• 9: Reynolds, C. 2006. Crowd simulation on PS3. In Game Developers Conference 2006.
• 10: Rudomín, I., Millán, E., and Hernández, B. 2005. Fragment shaders for agent animation using finite state machines. Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory 13, 8 (November), 741--751.
• 11: Szymon Rusinkiewicz , Marc Levoy, QSplat: a multiresolution point rendering system for large meshes, Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.343-352, July 2000 [doi>10.1145/344779.344940]
• 12: Scott, P. 2004. Shader model 3.0, best practices. Tech. rep., NVIDIA Corporation. available online at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/SM3 _0_best_practices.html.
• 13: Franco Tecchia , Yiorgos Chrysanthou, Real-Time Rendering of Densely Populated Urban Environments, Proceedings of the Eurographics Workshop on Rendering Techniques 2000, p.83-88, June 26-28, 2000
• 14: Greg Turk, Re-tiling polygonal surfaces, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.26 n.2, p.55-64, July 1992
• 15: Wand, M., and Strasser, W. 2002. Multi-resolution rendering of complex animated scenes. Computer Graphics Forum 21, 3. Eurographics 2002.
• 16: Zelsnack, J. 2004. GLSL pseudo-instancing. Tech. rep., NVIDIA Corporation. available online at http://download.nvidia.com/developer/SDK/Individual_Samples/samples.html.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Animation

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.3 Picture/Image Generation
          Subjects: Display algorithms

Keywords:
GPU, crowds, impostors, level of detail