Modeling and visualization of large and complex environments is a popular research area in computer graphics. Recent developments in processors and graphics cards, the amount of available memory and the development of computer graphics modeling and rendering techniques facilitate to run high quality simulations. Applications that require use of virtual cities cover a large spectrum, from military training and city planning to video games and tourism. To this end, virtual cities should be modeled in order to be used in such simulations. One major component of a virtual city that affects the realism is the building models. While modeling the buildings, to achieve complex and consistent geometries we use shape grammars. The derivation process incorporates randomness so the produced models have the desired variation. The end shapes of the building models could be defined in a certain extent by the derivation rules. The other major component of a virtual city is the pedestrian and vehicle population. In a large urban environment like a city there would be a large number of pedestrians which would really slow down an application unless the proper techniques are applied to simulate and animate the crowd. For this reason we prefer to use continuum dynamics based approach to simulate the crowd which produces more efficient simulations than the agent based approaches. Also the animation of the crowd would require various techniques to speed up the rendering without compromising the quality of the animation.

DATE: 30 April, 2007, Monday@ 17:00
PLACE: EA 409