Hierarchical Impostors for the Flocking Algorithm in 3D

The availability of powerful and affordable 3D PC graphics boards has made the rendering of rich immersive environments possible at interactive speeds. The scene update rate and the appropriate behaviour of objects within the world are central to this immersive feeling. This paper is concerned with the behaviour computations involved in the flocking algorithm, which has been used extensively to emulate the flocking behaviour of creatures found in nature. The main contribution of this paper is a new method for hierarchically combining portions of the flocks into groups to reduce the cost of the behavioural computation, allowing far larger flocks to be updated in real-time in the world