THE EFFECT OF CHARACTERS’ LOCOMOTON ON AUDIENCE PERCEPTION OF CROWD ANIMATION

A common practice in crowd animation is the use of human templates. A human template is a 3D character defined by its mesh, skeletal structure, materials, and textures. A crowd simulation is created by repeatedly instantiating a small set of human templates. For each instance, one texture is randomly chosen from the template’s available texture set, and color and shape variety techniques are applied so that multiple instances of the same template appear different (Thalmann & Musse, 2013). When dealing with very large crowds, it is inevitable to end up with instances that are exactly identical to other instances, as the number of different textures and shape modifications is limited. This poses a problem for crowd animation, as the viewers’ perception of identical characters could significantly decrease the believability of the crowd simulation. A variety of factors could affect viewers’ perception of identical characters, including crowd size, distance of the characters from the camera, background, movement, lighting conditions, etc. The study reported in this paper examined the extent to which the type of locomotion of the crowd characters affects the viewer’s ability to perceive identical instances within a medium size crowd (20 characters). The experiment involved 51 participants and compared the time the participants took to recognize two identical characters in three different locomotion scenarios (i.e. standing, walking, and running). Findings show that the type of locomotion did not have a statistically significant effect on the time subjects took to identify identical characters within the crowd. Hence, results suggest that audience perception of identical characters in a medium size crowd is not affected by the type of movement of the characters.