GPU Crowd Simulation

This is a conference sketch by Shopf, J., Oat, C., Barczak, J., presented in Siggraph Asia 2008.

I've been talking about how I am looking into creating a crowd simulation on the GPU. The sketch states that, to their knowledge it is the first implementation of a massive crowd simulation entirely on the GPU. A video clip of the simulation can be seen by clicking the picture below, and the slides of their Siggraph Asia 2008 presentation can be found here.



The implementation consists of a simulation of 65,000 agents at realtime frame rates. They have used a framework that combines a continuum-based global path planner (similar to the continnuum crowds post I did earlier), with a local avoidance model at a finer scale.

This also allows the level of detail to change as the view is scaled. There are other conference sketches by ATI, such as 'GPU Tesselation for Detailed, Animated Crowds', and 'GPU-Based Scene Management for Rendering Large Crowds' that must have been used in the simulation.

These sketches give an interesting insight into the capabilities of the GPU for simulating massive crowds, and how the level of detail can be varied based on the scale.

Continuum Crowds

This is a paper by Treuille, A. Cooper, S., and Popović, Z, presented in Siggraph 2006.
It's a real time crowd model based on continuum dynamics. The motion of crowds is controlled by a dynamic potential field, which allows it to avoid moving obstacles without the need of explicit collision avoidance. Their paper and video can be downloaded here.



This paper presents a lot of potential in creating a real time crowd simulation with large crowds. It would be interesting to see other implementations of this technique.