Real-time display of virtual humans: Levels of details and impostors

Rendering and animating in real time a multitude of articulated characters presents a real challenge, and few hardware systems are up to the task. Up to now, little research has been conducted to tackle the issue of real-time rendering of numerous virtual humans, This paper presents a hardware-indep endent technique that improves the display rate of animated characters by a cting on the sole geometric and rendering information. We first review the acceleration techniques traditionally in use in computer graphics and highl ight their suitability to articulated characters. We then show how impostor s can be used to render virtual humans. We introduce concrete case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, we tackle the visibility issue.