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Item A Dynamic Caching System for Rendering an Animated Crowd in Real-Time(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Lister, Wayne; Laycock, Robert G.; Day, Andrew M.; P. Alliez and M. MagnorWe present a method to accelerate the rendering of large crowds of animated characters. Recent trends have seen matrix-palette skinning become the prevalent approach due to its low memory overhead and fully dynamic geometry. However, the performance of skeletal animation remains modest in comparison to static rendering since neither temporal nor intra-frame coherency can be exploited. We cast crowd rendering as a memory-management problem and allocate a small geometry cache on the GPU within which animated characters can be stored. This serves to augment matrix-palette skinning with baked geometry and allows animation frames to be re-used by multi-pass rendering, between multiple agents and across multiple frames. Our method builds its cache dynamically and adapts to the current simulation state through use of the page-replacement algorithms traditionally employed by virtual-memory systems. In many cases this negates the need for skinning altogether and enables thousands of characters to be rendered in real-time, each independently animated and without loss of fidelity.Item Levels of Real-Time Crowd Navigation Behaviour in Urban Environments(The Eurographics Association, 2009) Haciomeroglu, Murat; Laycock, Robert G.; Day, Andrew M.; P. Alliez and M. MagnorContinuously increasing interest in real-time crowd simulations motivates researchers from multiple disciplines to investigate more realistic and efficient simulations. Often real-time crowd simulation systems are developed to enhance a user s experience. Therefore, in these applications, most of the computer processing power assigned to the crowd simulation should be given to the agents that will clearly gain a user's attention. This paper investigates methods to improve the computational efficiency of the simulation while not effecting the user s experience. For this reason six dynamically sized areas are defined according to the camera's position and direction. Three types of motion algorithms with different complexities are defined to be used in the different simulation areas. The proposed technique is used to simulate 10000 pedestrians in a 4km2 urban environment and is shown to offer more than 10 times improvement in computational performance.