Scalable behaviors for crowd simulation

Crowd simulation for virtual environments offers many challenges centered on the trade‐offs between rich behavior, control and computational cost. In this paper we present a new approach to controlling the behavior of agents in a crowd. Our method is scalable in the sense that increasingly complex crowd behaviors can be created without a corresponding increase in the complexity of the agents. Our approach is also more authorable; users can dynamically specify which crowd behaviors happen in various parts of an environment. Finally, the character motion produced by our system is visually convincing. We achieve our aims with a situation‐based control structure. Basic agents have very limited behaviors. As they enter new situations, additional, situation‐specific behaviors are composed on the fly to enable agents to respond appropriately. The composition is done using a probabilistic mechanism. We demonstrate our system with three environments including a city street and a theater. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Animation