Real-time crowd rendering has become an increasingly important topic in computer graphics and presents two separate challenges; that of displaying a large number of animated characters and that of incorporating plausible crowd variety. A significant amount of progress has been made in recent years and many of the fundamental problems have already been solved. For example, [Dud07, SBOT08] demonstrate how a combination of hardware skinning and geometry instancing can be used to draw several thousands of animated characters; [MYT08] provides an overview of how best to inject crowd variety and the latest research has shown where to focus computational resources in order to maximize the perception of variety by the user [MLD08, MLH09]. LOD techniques in terms of geometry, skeleton and motion simplifcation are considered in [SM08] but despite these advances, real-time crowd rendering remains a long way from where we envisage it to be.

One of the reasons for this is the concessions that have to be made when attempting to visualize many thousands of characters. In comparison to traditional character rendering, crowds are usually displayed by way of a dedicated (and far less capable) system and this distinction can become all too obvious when members of a crowd approach the camera too closely.

Our research has developed a unified approach that has the potential to remove these limitations by processing crowds akin to how we do with standard characters. This opens the door for a new wave of research by providing a platform on which to develop the animation and rendering techniques necessary to bring real-time crowds up to the level that we would expect from 'next-generation' games. The candidate should have a working knowledge of programmable shading and will have the opportunity to work with state-of-the-art technologies in computer graphics.

[Dud07] DUDASH B.: Animated crowd rendering. In GPU Gems 3, Nguyen H., (Ed.). Addison-Wesley Professional, 2007, pp. 39–52.

[MLD08] MCDONNELL R., LARKIN M., DOBBYN S., COLLINS S., O'SULLIVAN C.: Clone attack! Perception of crowd variety. ACM Transactions on Graphics 27, 3 (2008), 1–8.

[MLH09] MCDONNELL R., LARKIN M., HERNÁNDEZ B., RUDOMIN I., O'SULLIVAN C.: Eye-catching crowds: saliency based selective variation. ACM Transactions on Graphics 28, 3 (2009), 1–10.

[MYT08] MAÏM J., YERSIN B., THALMANN D.: Real-time crowds: architecture, variety, and motion planning. In SIGGRAPH Asia '08: ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 Courses (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 1–16.

[SBOT08] SHOPF J., BARCZAK J., OAT C., TATARCHUK N.: March of the froblins: simulation and rendering massive crowds of intelligent and detailed creatures on gpu. In SIGGRAPH '08: ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Classes (New York, NY, USA, 2008), ACM, pp. 52–101.

[SM08] SAVOYE Y., MEYER A.: Multi-layer level of detail for character animation. In Workshop on Virtual Reality Interaction and Physical Simulation (2008).