A Key‐Pose Caching System for Rendering an Animated Crowd in Real‐Time

Abstract

Abstract We present a method to accelerate the visualization of large crowds of animated characters. Linear‐blend skinning remains the dominant approach for animating a crowd but its efficiency can be improved by utilizing the temporal and intra‐crowd coherencies that are inherent within a populated scene. Our work adopts a caching system that enables a skinned key‐pose to be re‐used by multi‐pass rendering, between multiple agents and across multiple frames. We investigate two different methods; an intermittent caching scheme (whereby each member of a crowd is animated using only its nearest key‐pose) and an interpolative approach that enables key‐pose blending to be supported. For the latter case, we show that finding the optimal set of key‐poses to store is an NP‐hard problem and present a greedy algorithm suitable for real‐time applications. Both variants deliver a worthwhile performance improvement in comparison to using linear‐blend skinning alone.