Real-time Simulation and Rendering of Large-scale Crowd Motion

Crowd simulations are attracting increasing attention from both academia and the industry field and are implemented across a vast range of applications, from scientific demonstrations to video games and films. As such, the demand for greater realism in their aesthetics and the amount of agents involved is always growing. A successful crowd simulation must simulate large numbers of pedestrians’ behaviours as realistically as possible in real-time. The thesis looks at two important aspects of crowd simulation and real-time animation. First, this thesis introduces a new data structure called Extended Oriented Bounding Box (EOBB) and related methods for fast collision detection and obstacle avoidance in the simulation of crowd motion in virtual environments. The EOBB is extended to contain a region whose size is defined based on the instantaneous velocity vector, thus allowing a bounding volume representation of both geometry and motion. Such a representation is also found to be highly effective in motion planning using the location of vertices of bounding boxes in the immediate neighbourhood of the current crowd member. Second, we present a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of spatial subdivision data structures, specifically for large-scale crowd simulation. For large-scale crowd simulation, computational time for collision detection is huge, and many studies use spatial partitioning data structure to reduce the computational time, depicting their strengths and weaknesses, but few compare multiple methods in an effort to present the best solution. This thesis attempts to address this by implementing and comparing four popular spatial partitioning data structures with the EOBB.