Interactive Techniques for Populating Large Virtual Cities

For many applications, exploring empty virtual cities is not sufficient: streets and squares need to be populated by crowds of virtual humans. This position paper addresses the problem of generating such crowds when the scale of the city prevents the use of standard simulation methods. We first present the concept of crowd patches and review their advantages and drawbacks for animating large crowds of people. We then discuss the goals of our future work, namely being able to interactively design such large populations.