Image-based crowd rendering

Populated virtual urban environments are important in many applications, from urban planning to entertainment. At the current stage of technology, users can interactively navigate through complex, polygon-based scenes rendered with sophisticated lighting effects and high-quality antialiasing techniques. As a result, animated characters (or agents) that users can interact with are also becoming increasingly common. However, rendering crowded scenes with thousands of different animated virtual people in real time is still challenging. To address this, we developed an image-based rendering approach for displaying multiple avatars. We take advantage of the properties of the urban environment and the way a viewer and the avatars move within it to produce fast rendering, based on positional and directional discretization. To display many different individual people at interactive frame rates, we combined texture compression with multipass rendering.