Torso Crowds

We present a novel dense crowd simulation method. In real crowds of high density, people manoeuvring the crowd need to twist their torso to pass between others. Our proposed method does not use the traditional disc-shaped agent, but instead employs capsule-shaped agents, which enables us to plan such torso orientations. Contrary to other crowd simulation systems, which often focus on the movement of the entire crowd, our method distinguishes between active agents that try to manoeuvre through the crowd, and passive agents that have no incentive to move. We introduce the concept of a focus point to influence crowd agent orientation. Recorded data from real human crowds are used for validation, which shows that our proposed model produces equivalent paths for 85 percent of the validation set. Furthermore, we present a character animation technique that uses the results from our crowd model to generate torso-twisting and side-stepping characters.