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Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution

Crowd simulations have become increasingly popular in films over the past decade, appearing in large crowd shots of many big name block-buster films. An important requirement for crowd simulations in films is that they should be directable both at a high and low level, and be believable. As agent-ba...

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Main Author: Wang, Sunrise
Other Authors: Gain, James
Format: Thesis
Language:English
Published: Department of Computer Science 2016
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access_status_str Open Access
author Wang, Sunrise
author2 Gain, James
author_browse Gain, James
Wang, Sunrise
author_facet Gain, James
Wang, Sunrise
author_sort Wang, Sunrise
collection Thesis
description Crowd simulations have become increasingly popular in films over the past decade, appearing in large crowd shots of many big name block-buster films. An important requirement for crowd simulations in films is that they should be directable both at a high and low level, and be believable. As agent-based techniques allow for low-level directability and more believable crowds, they are typically used in this field. However, due to the bottom-up nature of these techniques, achieving high level direct ability requires the modification of agent-level parameters until the desired crowd behaviour emerges. As manually adjusting parameters is a time consuming and tedious process, this thesis investigates a method for automating this, using Neuro-Evolution (NE). This is achieved by using Artificial Neural Networks as the agent controllers within an animated scene, and evolving these with an Evolutionary Algorithm so that the agents behave as desired. To this end, this thesis proposes, implements, and evaluates a system that allows for the low-level control of crowds using NE. Overall, this approach shows very promising results, with the time taken to achieve the desired crowd behaviours being either on par or faster than previous methods.
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institution University of Cape Town (South Africa)
language eng
last_indexed 2026-06-10T12:33:21.255Z
license_str Not specified — see source repository
provenance_str_mv Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
publishDate 2016
publishDateRange 2016
publishDateSort 2016
publisher Department of Computer Science
publisherStr Department of Computer Science
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source_str UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository
spelling oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/20015 Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution Wang, Sunrise Gain, James Nitschke, Geo Computer Science Crowd simulations have become increasingly popular in films over the past decade, appearing in large crowd shots of many big name block-buster films. An important requirement for crowd simulations in films is that they should be directable both at a high and low level, and be believable. As agent-based techniques allow for low-level directability and more believable crowds, they are typically used in this field. However, due to the bottom-up nature of these techniques, achieving high level direct ability requires the modification of agent-level parameters until the desired crowd behaviour emerges. As manually adjusting parameters is a time consuming and tedious process, this thesis investigates a method for automating this, using Neuro-Evolution (NE). This is achieved by using Artificial Neural Networks as the agent controllers within an animated scene, and evolving these with an Evolutionary Algorithm so that the agents behave as desired. To this end, this thesis proposes, implements, and evaluates a system that allows for the low-level control of crowds using NE. Overall, this approach shows very promising results, with the time taken to achieve the desired crowd behaviours being either on par or faster than previous methods. 2016-06-10T10:54:58Z 2016-06-10T10:54:58Z 2015 Master Thesis Masters MSc http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20015 eng application/pdf Department of Computer Science Faculty of Science University of Cape Town
spellingShingle Computer Science
Wang, Sunrise
Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution
thesis_degree_str Master's
title Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution
title_full Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution
title_fullStr Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution
title_full_unstemmed Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution
title_short Evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with Neuro-Evolution
title_sort evolving controllable emergent crowd behaviours with neuro evolution
topic Computer Science
url http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20015
work_keys_str_mv AT wangsunrise evolvingcontrollableemergentcrowdbehaviourswithneuroevolution