An old algorithm for visual simulation of climbing plants is extended here. Plants are modeled as systems of oriented particles that are able to sense their environment. Particles move to the best locations using directed random walk. We use the phenomenon of traumatic reiteration for critical cases. If there is no location for further growth possible the particle dies, but before sends a signal that is propagated down in the plant structure. This signal activates the closest possible sleeping particle that takes its job. We use an associated voxel space for collisions and space occupancy detection as well as for evaluating the illumination of the plant organs. The algorithm is fast, easy to implement, and runs interactively even for quite large scenes on a medium-class computer. We believe that this approach can be used as an interactive technique in architecture, computer games, computer animation, etc.

Figure 1: Rendering of a 1, 048, 576 character crowd. AbstractAnimated 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.

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In a previous paper we generated animated agents and their behavior in XML. These agents were specified as FSMs. We make the system more useful by implementing probabilistic FSMs. We show how more interesting behaviors can be generated. Then, we make the system more flexible and structured by implementing layered FSMs and hierarchical FSMs. We show how both of these approaches, used independently or together, allow the user to write more complex behaviors.

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