Flock Morphing-Shape Constrained Flock Animation

With the rapid development of the 3D software technology and the hardware computing ability, the public attention in group animation, which is a burgeon field, is growing. They are widely used in televisions, movies and games to simulate the motion of virtual human and animals.Because crowds are ubiquitous in the real world, crowd simulation is very important and useful in entertainment industry. Crowd animation can be used to replace real crowds to create large scale war scenes and reduce the shooting cost for films and TVs.In this thesis, we create an interactive crowd simulating system based on OpenSteer, which is an open source library. We propose a novel shape constrained flock animation method to create special effects for televisions and movies by integrating the features of 3D morphing and flocking animation.Given a 3D model, we first sample it to get a set of points which cover the model through a process of 3D surface mosaics. These points are then used as homing target points in the flocking model to create a homing flock animation, by establishing the point correspondence between two given mesh models. By using multiple local control rules, the elements will form a homing flock. Our approach can create a novel visually pleasing flock morphing effect between arbitrary mesh models.