Managing coherent groups

The animation of groups of characters involves the generation of some interesting steering behaviors like following a single path, moving toward a common objective, and moving while keeping a formation. This paper presents a new approach to manage the movement of groups in dynamic environments using a simple and robust algorithm that includes a strategy to keep formations during the displacement of the group. Our method is based on a boundary value problem (BVP) involving Laplace’s equation and has two layers. In the first one, a group map is built to allow for local control of each individual, while in the second one a path planning is performed for each group as a whole. Results show that our technique is robust to several situations and can be implemented on GPU, which results in real-time performance for large groups. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.