Crowd Simulation - Crowd AI

Crowd AI

The entities - also called agents - are given artificial intelligence, which guides the entities based on one or more functions, such as sight, hearing, basic emotion, energy level, aggressiveness level, etc. The entities are given goals and then interact with each other as members of a real crowd would. They are often programmed to respond to changes in environment, enabling them to climb hills, jump over holes, scale ladders, etc. This system is much more realistic than particle motion, but is very expensive to program and implement.

The most notable examples of AI simulation can be seen in New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings films, where AI armies of many thousands battle each other. The crowd simulation was done using Weta Digital's Massive software.