Pipeline for Populating Games with Realistic Crowds

With the increase in realism of games based in stadiums and urban environments, real-time crowds are becoming essential in order to provide a believable environment. However, realism is still largely lacking due to the computation required. In this paper, we describe the pipeline of work needed in order to prepare and export models from a 3D modelling package into a crowd system. For our crowd, we use a hybrid geometry/impostor approach which allows thousands of characters to be rendered of high visual quality. We use pre-simulated sequences of cloth to further enhance the characters appearance, along with perceptual metrics to balance computation with visual fidelity.