Crowd Simulation

Crowd simulations are becoming increasingly important for public authorities and researchers. The film and video game industry have been developing and using tools for crowd simulations for decades. The Maya plugin Miarmy is such a tool, but it was not designed specifically for scientific purposes. We perform experiments in Miarmy to test its functionality. Simple scenes can be set up, simulated and rendered quickly and efficiently with Miarmy. However, with increasingly complex scenes, the Miarmy interface becomes less useful, and performs suboptimal on tasks it was not explicitly designed for. We overcome some of Miarmy’s limitations by exploiting its Python script interface. Although much flexibility can be gained this way and the tool is still being developed, it is unlikely that Miarmy will be useful for exact sciences, where dedicated custom simulations can be used instead. However, Miarmy is very useful to create and visualize diverse crowds, as it offers interfaces to various renderers and makes randomizing agent properties easy. Finally, we simulate and render two scenes using the methods we developed in the experiments: A huge ball crashing into a train station hall and a simple imitation of a soccer game.