ABSTRACT
Real-time rendering of detailed animated characters in crowd simulations is still a challenging problem in computer graphics. State-of-the-art approaches can render up to several thousand agents by consuming most of the graphics processing unit (GPU) resources, leaving little room for other GPU uses such as driving the crowd simulation. Polygonal meshes deformed through skinning in real time are suitable for simulations involving a relatively small number of agents, since the rendering cost of each animated character is proportional to the complexity of its polygonal representation.
