Directing Crowd Simulations Using Navigation Fields

—We present a novel approach to direct and control virtual crowds using navigation fields. Our method guides one or more agents towards desired goals based on guidance fields. The system allows the user to specify these fields by either sketching paths directly in the scene via an intuitive authoring interface or by importing motion flow fields extracted from crowd video footage. We propose a novel formulation to blend input guidance fields to create singularity-free, goal-directed navigation fields. Our method can be easily combined with most current local collision-avoidance methods and we use two such methods as examples to highlight the potential of our approach. We illustrate its performance on several simulation scenarios.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Sachin Patil, Jur P. van den Berg, Sean Curtis, Ming C. Lin, Dinesh Manocha
• Keywords: Crowd Video Footage, Intuitive Authoring Interface, Navigation fields, TVCG 2011