Abstract
Modern virtual environments can contain a variety of characters and
traversable regions. Each character may have different preferences
for the traversable region types. Pedestrians may prefer to walk on
sidewalks, but they may occasionally need to traverse roads and dirt
paths. By contrast, wild animals might try to stay in forest areas,
but they are able to leave their protective environment when necessary.
This paper presents a novel path planning method named MIRAN
(Modified Indicative Routes and Navigation) that takes a character’s
region preferences into account. Given an indicative route
as a rough estimation of a character’s preferred route, MIRAN efficiently
computes a visually convincing path that is smooth, keeps
clearance from obstacles, avoids unnecessary detours, and allows local
changes to avoid other characters. To the best of our knowledge,
MIRAN is the first path planning method that supports the above
features while using an exact representation of the navigable space.
Experiments show that with our approach a wide range of different
character behaviors can be simulated. It also overcomes problems
that occur in previous path planning methods such as the Indicative
Route Method. The resulting paths are well-suited for real-time simulations
and gaming applications.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | ASCI.OPEN2013, Eindhoven |
Publication status | Published - 2013 |