A Dynamic Representation-Switch Method for Hybrid Crowd Rendering Systems

Environments populated with crowds are employed in various applications, such as games, simulators and editors. Many of these environments require not only a realistic and detailed rendering, but it must run smoothly in real-time. This task easily exhausts the system´s resources, even considering the current state-of-the-art hardware. Therefore, crowd rendering in real-time remains a challenge in computer graphics. Approaches exploiting levels of detail, visibility culling and image-based rendering are presented in the literature to facilitate this task. The first two increase the efficiency of rendering, but sometimes are not enough to keep an interactive frame rate. Some researches on this subject focus on image-based rendering techniques, specifically with the use of impostors. In this work it is proposed a method that balances the computational demand of rendering job by varying the threshold´s distance of the representation switch between full geometry (mesh) and image-based (impostors) models in accordance with the available resources.