Three LOD for the Realistic and Real-Time Rendering of Crowds with Dynamic Lighting

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Jean-Marc Coic (Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK)
Celine Loscos (c.loscos-at-cs.ucl.ac.uk, Department of Computer Science, University College London, UK)
Alexandre Meyer (Alexandre.Meyer-at-liris.cnrs.fr, LIRIS Lab, Universit Claude Bernard Lyon 1, France.)

Abstract: Populated urban environments are very important in many applications such as urban planning and entertainment. Techniques that populate a 3D virtual city with hundreds of pedestrians walking in real-time have previously been developed using image based rendering techniques. However, when visualising these avatars nearby the viewpoint, such methods provide a poor rendering quality. In this paper, we propose a method based on three rendering techniques used as levels of details. We provide continuous transitions between them by maintaining a similar dynamic lighting on each level. For closed objects, we use a polygonal representation. At the intermediate level, we adapt the existing layered impostor technique to animated objects and we add a dynamic lighting. As the object gets further, this layered representation is used with a decreasing number of layers to reach the third level, a one-polygon impostor. Our technique contributes to improve the realism of virtual humans in a crowd while maintaining an interactive frame rate.

@techreport{RR-CLM05,
        title = "Three LOD for the Realistic and Real-Time Rendering of Crowds with Dynamic Lighting",
        author = "Jean-Marc Coic and Celine Loscos and Alexandre Meyer",
         institution = "Laboratoire d'InfoRmatique en Images et Systèmes d'information, Université Claude Bernard, France",
        month = April,
        number = "RR-2005-008",
        type = "Research Report",
        url = "http://liris.cnrs.fr/alexandre.meyer/research/RR2005/RR-2005-008.pdf",
        year = "2005",
}