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The simulation of large crowds of humans is important in many fields of computer graphics, including real-time applications such as games, as they can breathe life into otherwise static scenes and enhance believability. In the Image Synthesis Group
(ISG) in Trinity College Dublin, we have developed a large-scale interactive model of Dublin city with crowds of humans. Our novel hybrid rendering system for crowds solves the classic problem of degraded quality of image-based representations at close distances by
building an impostor rendering system on top of a full,
geometry-based, human animation system. This enables almost
imperceptible switching between the two representations based on a
"pixel to texel" ratio, with minimal popping artefacts. Seamless
interchanges are further facilitated by exploiting programmable
graphics hardware to efficiently enhance the realism and variety
of the dynamically-lit impostors, thereby also improving on
existing impostor techniques. Our results demonstrate a system capable of rendering large realistic crowds of over 50,000 individuals on commodity PCs with the visual realism of a high-resolution geometry rendering
system.
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