Real Time Rendering of Populated Urban Environments

Introduction The wide use of computer graphics in games, entertainment, medical, architectural and cultural applications, has led it to becoming a prevalent area of research. At the current stage of technology, users can interactively navigate through complex, polygon-based scenes rendered with sophisticated lighting effects and high quality antialiasing techniques. Animated characters (or agents) with whom the users can interact, are also becoming more and more common. However, the rendering of crowded scenes with thousands of different animated avatars has still not been addressed sufficiently for real time use. In this paper we propose new methods for the rendering and culling of these highly populated scenes. The system makes use of a subdivision of space into a 2D grid. This data structure is used to perform efficient occlusion culling on the environment and on the avatars, as well as for the agents’ navigation and shadowing.