ERATO Proceedings Istanbul 2006.pdf - Odeon

2.1 High Fidelity Actors
The high-level of variety in a crowd re-inforces the believability and reliability of the simulation. Our
crowd engine can render up to 1000 virtual characters including the odeon environment with
interactive frame rates. To emphasize the importance of special characters, our system is extended for
rendering and animating virtual characters using different code paths. Based on requirements, we can
use a fast and low resource usage path or a more detailed path for more realistic rendering. When
rendering a crowd simulation, it is impossible to give as much detail and attention to every virtual
character, than with systems that are displaying only a few characters at the same time.
Our experience has shown that if the crowd can use basic behaviors with a good sensation of
presence, special characters that attract the attention of end-users need to be more detailed. Thus,
special characters, such as senators have their own alternate code path. They shared the same DNA
in term of functionalities than the lighter model. High fidelity actors represent virtual characters that
have an influence on the scenario. From a content creation point of view, designers are allowed to
increase the complexity by creating more detailed 3D meshes or by taking advantage of more
advanced vertex and fragment shaders. From an animation perspective, the high fidelity actors need
to be compliant with the H-ANIM 1.1 standard [HANIM]. This opens to a wide range of additional
techniques including the benefit of extending the animation bank with hundreds of motion capture
clips and inverse kinematics as featured in Fig 2.
Figure 2: A senator (high fidelity actor) making his entrance in the odeon.