Hindawi International Journal of Computer Games Technology Volume 2019, Article ID 1792304, 15 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/1792304 Research Article Real-Time Large Crowd Rendering with Efficient Character and Instance Management on GPU Yangzi Dong and Chao Peng Department of Computer Science, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL 35899, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Yangzi Dong;
[email protected] Received 20 October 2018; Revised 26 January 2019; Accepted 3 March 2019; Published 26 March 2019 Academic Editor: Ali Arya Copyright © 2019 Yangzi Dong and Chao Peng. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Achieving the efcient rendering of a large animated crowd with realistic visual appearance is a challenging task when players interact with a complex game scene. We present a real-time crowd rendering system that efciently manages multiple types of character data on the GPU and integrates seamlessly with level-of-detail and visibility culling techniques. Te character data, including vertices, triangles, vertex normals, texture coordinates, skeletons, and skinning weights, are stored as either bufer objects or textures in accordance with their access requirements at the rendering stage. Our system preserves the view-dependent visual appearance of individual character instances in the crowd and is executed with a fne-grained parallelization scheme. We compare our approach with the existing crowd rendering techniques. Te experimental results show that our approach achieves better rendering performance and visual quality. Our approach is able to render a large crowd composed of tens of thousands of animated instances in real time by managing each type of character data in a single bufer object.