An Evaluation of a Sketch-Based Model-by-Example Approach for Crowd Modelling

Guan, L. and W�nsche, B. C.

An increasing number of computer applications require complex 3D environments. Examples are entertainment (games and movies), advertisement, social media technologies such as �Second Life�, education, urban planning, landscape design, search and rescue simulations, visual impact studies and military simulations. Many virtual environments contain thousands of similar objects such as characters, trees, and buildings. Placing these objects by hand is cumbersome, whereas an automatic placement does not allow sufficient control over the desired distribution characteristics. In previous work we presented a prototype for a sketch-based model-by-example approach to generate large distributions of objects from sketched example distributions. In this paper we present an improved algorithm and we perform a formal user study demonstrating that the approach is indeed intuitive, effective, and that it works for a large number of regular, irregular and clustered distribution patterns. Remaining limitations related to Gestalt and semantic concepts are illustrated and discussed.

Cite as: Guan, L. and W�nsche, B. C. (2012). An Evaluation of a Sketch-Based Model-by-Example Approach for Crowd Modelling. In Proc. Australasian User Interface Conference (AUIC 2012) Melbourne, Australia. CRPIT, 126. Shen, H. and Smith, R. T. Eds., ACS. 69-76

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