Yazel, David J. wrote: > I thought the list might be interested in some notes on this subject. We > will be attempting the implement the scheme described below in the near > future, and if there is interest I would be happy to share the results.
Having a read through here, there appears to be nothing particularly new as most of these are tried and trusted techniques. I get the gut-feeling that you are just digging through the issues and finding them out for yourself the first time through trial and error. I'd like to point you in the direction of a few siggraph papers over the last 10 years or so that work through a lot of these, but I don't have anything except last year's proceedings handy. Anyway, there is on particular paper in there that will be extremely handy for you because it describes almost exactly what you want to do - with one extra benefit - shadows. The presentation was titled "Real-time rendering of populated urban environments" by Franco Tecchia of University College London. The basic technique uses imposters, where the imposters are animated to simulate walking crowds. In addition to this, shadows are projected so that as you fly through the scene, the crowd appears to be mingling and looks very realistic. IIRC they used six different imposter characters, and then variations on the colours of each character for even more visual variety. In the summary they say: "The system was testing on a PC Pentium 833MHz with a GeForce2 GTS 64MB. We populated our environment with a total of 10,000 humans walking aroudn a village modeled with 41,260 polygons and performing collision avoidance against the building and between the avatars themselves. At a video resolution of 1152x768 the display updated on average at 17fps". The URL given is: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Y.Chrysanthou/crowds/sketch/ -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Freelance Java Consultant http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
