high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Animated crowds are effective to increase realism in virtual reality applications. However, rendering crowds requires large computational power. In this paper, we present a technique suitable to render large crowds of characters that takes advantage of existing programmable graphics hardware. Impostors are used for low-detail representation, while pseudo-instancing is used for higher detail. A LOD map is used to select between both representations, based on a customizable threshold.