Creating Crowd Characters Through Procedural Deformation

Abstract

Crowd simulations are a popular narrative tool in the entertainment industry and rely heavily on crowd characters for their effectiveness. The traditional processes employed for modeling characters are expensive and impractical for creating crowd character models, leading to the development and use of combinatorial methods. While combinatorial methods are effective at creating large numbers of unique character variations, they lack the flexibility to create characters outside the range of possible variations. This limitation is particularly troublesome in production circumstances that entail frequent fluctuations in character asset requests and in real-time interactive experiences. This is primarily because it is difficult to predetermine the various states in which crowd characters will be rendered. This thesis explores a procedural, parametrically driven system for creating crowd characters that allows for greater flexibility in changing scenarios. This system uses craniofacial anthropometric data - sourced from existing literature - to create a multidimensional parametric structure from which procedurally randomized values can be generated and selected. Once new parametric values are generated, a base craniofacial model is deformed accordingly, resulting in a unique model that represents the parameter values assigned. The results of this method demonstrate the ability of a procedurally driven, craniofacial anthropometric facial deformation system to rapidly and efficiently create a large set of unique crowd character facial models that share a single UV map and polygonal topology. The results of this research indicate such a procedurally driven crowd character creation system would provide artists with the flexibility to quickly iterate and produce desirable results in scenarios such as interactive games.