A unified structure for crowd simulation

Realistic simulation of crowds is an important issue for the production of virtual worlds for games, entertainment or architectural and urban planning. Difficult issues need to be addressed such as collision avoidance and the handling of dynamic environments. In this paper, we present a unified structure for the simulation of crowds in complex urban environments. We propose a topological multiresolution model supporting different levels of details, allowing efficient proximity querying and compatible with real-time rendering and hierarchical path planning. A fine exploitation of the multiscale aspect of the underlying model allows to achieve the same efficiency as the fastest existing methods. The generality of the approach allows the simulation to be executed on any two manifold, and the unified approach eases the handling of dynamic environments. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.