Implementation of a Virtual Crowd Simulation System

This paper introduces a practical implementation of virtual crowd simulation software. Usual commercial crowd simulation softwares are complex and have program-like script interfaces, which makes an animator hard to learn and use them. Based on the observations that most crowd scenes include walking, running and fighting movements, we have implemented a crowd simulation system that automatically generates movements of virtual characters given user's minimal direction of initial configuration. The system was implemented as a plug-in of Maya which is one of the most commonly used 3D software for movies. Because generated movements are based on optically captured motion clips, the results are sufficiently natural.