Beacco, A.Spanlang, B.Andujar, C.Pelechano, N.Eduard Groeller and Holly Rushmeier2015-02-272015-02-2720111467-8659https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8659.2011.02065.xRendering detailed animated characters is a major limiting factor in crowd simulation. In this paper we present a new representation for 3D animated characters which supports output‐sensitive rendering. Our approach is flexible in the sense that it does not require us to pre‐define the animation sequences beforehand, nor to pre‐compute a dense set of pre‐rendered views for each animation frame. Each character is encoded through a small collection of textured boxes storing colour and depth values. At runtime, each box is animated according to the rigid transformation of its associated bone and a fragment shader is used to recover the original geometry using a dual‐depth version of relief mapping. Unlike competing output‐sensitive approaches, our compact representation is able to recover high‐frequency surface details and reproduces view‐motion parallax effectively. Our approach drastically reduces both the number of primitives being drawn and the number of bones influencing each primitive, at the expense of a very slight per‐fragment overhead. We show that, beyond a certain distance threshold, our compact representation is much faster to render than traditional level‐of‐detail triangle meshes. Our user study demonstrates that replacing polygonal geometry by our impostors produces negligible visual artefacts.