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Realistic Crowd Animation: a Perceptual Approach

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Realistic Crowd Animation: a Perceptual Approach Realistic Crowd Animation: A Perceptual Approach by Rachel McDonnell, B.A. (Mod) Dissertation Presented to the University of Dublin, Trinity College in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Dublin, Trinity College November 2006 Declaration I, the undersigned, declare that this work has not previously been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this, or any other University, and that unless otherwise stated, is my own work. Rachel McDonnell November 14, 2006 Permission to Lend and/or Copy I, the undersigned, agree that Trinity College Library may lend or copy this thesis upon request. Rachel McDonnell November 14, 2006 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Carol O’Sullivan, for all her help, guidance, advice, and encouragement. I couldn’t imagine a better supervisor! Secondly, I would like thank the past and present members of the ISG, for making the last four years very enjoyable. In particular, Ann McNamara for her enthusiasm and for advising me to do a PhD. Also, to all my friends and in particular my housemates for taking my mind off my research in the evenings! A special thank you to Mam, Dad and Sarah for the all the encouragement and interest in everything that I do. Finally, thanks to Simon for helping me through the four years, and in particular for the all the support in the last few months leading up to submitting. Rachel McDonnell University of Dublin, Trinity College November 2006 iv Realistic Crowd Animation: A Perceptual Approach Publication No. Rachel McDonnell, Ph.D. University of Dublin, Trinity College, 2006 Supervisor: Carol O’Sullivan v Abstract Real-time applications such as games or urban simulations are often highly complex in nature. User expectations grow year by year, along with a concomitant desire for added realism. Due to the performance limitations of computing and rendering hardware, the use of simplification techniques to trade accuracy for performance is therefore of paramount importance. The goal of this thesis is to develop methods and metrics to balance visual fidelity with performance, primarily through the use of perceptual principles. While large-scale crowds of virtual characters have become commonplace in movies in recent years (e.g., the Lord of the Rings trilogy), this ubiquity has not been paralleled in real- time systems such as video games, due to the limited resources that are available. The game industry is the primary market, but real-time crowd simulation is also important in other areas such as cultural heritage, environmental applications, architectural pre-visualisations and VR for rehabilitation. The starting point for this research was a Virtual Dublin urban model, inhabited by crowds of pedestrians, developed by other researchers in the Interaction, Simulation and Graphics Lab in Trinity College Dublin. The crowds are rendered using a hybrid approach, where detailed geometric representations are presented at close proximity to the viewer, and impostors are presented in the background. This thesis builds on this system, by incorpo- rating perceptual principles to improve the visual fidelity, and adding deformable clothing to the characters. A number of somewhat ad hoc strategies for balancing realism with performance have been employed for the rendering of crowds. Decisions for adding extra levels of detail are typically based on frame rate improvements alone, so it is difficult to get a true impression vi of what the end-user perceived. We wanted to directly explore these issues, thereby filling in the gaps in our understanding of the relationships between animation, level of detail, and perception. Another motivation was that real-time crowds still suffer from severely reduced realism, compared with their movie counterparts and the real world. We felt that one of the significant factors that accounted for this was the rigidity of the clothing on the characters. Real clothing exhibits folding and crumpling, and its motion can range anywhere from starchy to flowing. The main contribution of this thesis is improving the realism of real-time crowds, through psychophysical evaluation of the influencing factors, the development of perceptual metrics, and the addition of pattern variety and pre-simulated clothing. vii Relevant Publications: 1. Perceptually Adaptive Graphics : A Review: Carol O’Sullivan, Rachel McDon- nell, Yann Morvan; Computer Graphics Forum (to appear in 2007) 2. Crowd Creation Pipeline for Games: Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn, Carol O’Sullivan; To appear in proceedings of the 9th international conference on computer games, CGames 2006 3. Perceptual Evaluation of LOD Clothing for Virtual Humans: Rachel McDon- nell, Simon Dobbyn, Steven Collins, Carol O’Sullivan; In Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, pp. 117-126, 2006 4. Clothing The Masses: Real-Time Clothed Crowds With Variation: Simon Dobbyn, Rachel McDonnell, Steven Collins, Ladislav Kavan, Carol O’Sullivan; Euro- graphics Short Presentations, pp. 103-160, 2006 5. LOD Human Representations A Comparative Study: Rachel McDonnell, Si- mon Dobbyn, Carol O’Sullivan; In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Crowd Simulation, pp. 101-115, 2005 6. Perceptual Evaluation of Impostor Representations for Virtual Humans and Buildings: John Hamill, Rachel McDonnell, Simon Dobbyn; Computer Graphics Fo- rum (Eurographics 2005), 24(3), pp. 623-633, 2005 7. Perceptually Adaptive Graphics: Carol O’Sullivan, Sarah Howlett, Yann Morvan, Rachel McDonnell, Keith O’Conor; Eurographics State of the Art reports, pp. 141-164, 2004 viii Contents Acknowledgments iv Abstract v List of Tables xii List of Figures xiii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Methodology .................................... 3 1.2 Motivation ..................................... 4 1.3 Scope ........................................ 5 1.4 Contributions................................... 5 1.5 SummaryofChapters ............................... 6 Chapter 2 Background and Related Work 7 2.1 Appearance..................................... 7 2.1.1 Virtual Human Representation . 7 2.1.2 VirtualCrowds............................... 11 2.1.3 CrowdVisualisation . 12 2.1.4 Variety ................................... 16 2.2 GeneratingHumanMotion . 18 2.2.1 Keyframing................................. 18 2.2.2 Physically-based Animation . 19 2.2.3 MotionCapture .............................. 20 2.2.4 GroupandCrowdanimation . 22 2.3 SecondaryMotion ................................. 24 2.4 Discussion...................................... 29 ix Chapter 3 Perception of Human Motion 30 3.1 Perception of Human Motion: Psychology Findings . ......... 30 3.1.1 Biological motion perception . 31 3.1.2 Connection between the brain and motion perception . ....... 32 3.1.3 Summary .................................. 34 3.2 Perception of Human Motion for Computer Animation . ........ 34 3.2.1 Specifying and Modifying Motion . 35 3.2.2 Perceptual Studies on Motion Transitions . ...... 36 3.2.3 Perceptual Metrics for Animation . 39 3.2.4 LevelofDetail ............................... 44 3.3 ExperimentalDesign .............................. 46 3.3.1 Measuresofresponse. 46 3.3.2 Staircases .................................. 49 3.3.3 Analysis................................... 50 3.4 Discussion...................................... 52 Chapter 4 Psychophysical Evaluation of LOD Humans 54 4.1 Introduction.................................... 54 4.2 Perception of Human Appearance . 55 4.2.1 ExpHuman1: ImpostorExperiment. 55 4.2.2 Exp Human 2: Low Resolution Experiment . 58 4.3 Exp Human 3: Perception of Human Motion . 66 4.3.1 ModelTypes ................................ 66 4.3.2 Creating the Motion Variation . 72 4.3.3 CreatingtheStimuli .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 75 4.3.4 Apparatus and Participants . 76 4.3.5 VisualContentandProcedure . 77 4.3.6 JointWeighting............................... 79 4.3.7 Results ................................... 81 4.4 Discussion...................................... 86 Chapter 5 Psychophysical Evaluation of LOD Clothing 91 5.1 Overview ...................................... 91 5.2 Introduction.................................... 91 5.3 Motivation ..................................... 92 5.4 PsychophysicalExperiments. ..... 93 5.4.1 Exp Cloth 1: Determining Perceptually Linear “Stiffness” Scale . 97 x 5.4.2 Exp Cloth 2: Stiffness Sorting Experiment . 100 5.4.3 Exp Cloth 3: Stiffness Forced Choice Experiment . 103 5.4.4 ExpCloth 4: LODComparisonExperiment . 106 5.4.5 Exp Cloth 5: Impostor Update Frequency Test . 109 5.4.6 ExpCloth6: SystemExperiment. 117 5.5 Discussion...................................... 125 Chapter 6 Perceptually Guided Geopostor System with Clothed Characters127 6.1 Stage1:ModelPrepping. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 129 6.1.1 PreparingtheHuman ........................... 129 6.1.2 Preparing the Deformable Clothing . 133 6.2 Stage2:ExportingtheData . 141 6.2.1 ExportingtheGeometry. 142 6.2.2 ExportingtheImpostor . 142 6.3 Stage3:CrowdRendering. 144 6.3.1 Setup .................................... 144 6.3.2 Rendering the Geometric Human and Cloth Models . 144 6.3.3 RenderingtheImpostor . 145 6.4 ProofofConcept .................................. 152 6.5 Discussion...................................... 153 Chapter 7 Conclusions and Future Work 155 7.1 SummaryofContributions. 155 7.2 Reflections on Experimental Design . 158 7.2.1 2AFCvsyes-nodesign........................... 158 7.2.2 Staircase vs Method of Constant Stimuli . 158 7.3
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