Real-time crowd visualization in point-cached pipelines

In computer animation, a crowd of characters can create a dramatic visual impact and make an expansive set feel like it's teeming with life. To orchestrate this large scale animation, technical directors use procedural tools to author animation en masse. The character animation is created by animators for an array of background models, such as walk cycles, action transitions, and reactions. Despite being modeled and rigged specifically as a background character, deformation of crowd characters is still driven by high fidelity rigs that are too expensive to execute in real-time, even for small scale crowds. Background characters are designed to have parametric controls to create visual diversity, which require heavier mesh geometry to support such variation. The character structure must support standard shading and lighting workflows, which result in characters that include separate object primitives for skin, hair, and clothing, and frequently even more fine grained objects for eyes, teeth, fingernails, etc.