Virtual Group Cuddling

This is the humorous name for a dense crowd of people, for example at a Christmas market. At the Blender Conference, Sybren Stüvel explained how to simulate such crowds in Blender.

Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 26, 2015. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

Among other things, he shows how to avoid collisions as well as optical illusions, so that the crowd of virtual characters ultimately behaves realistically.

The crowd-simulation method used by Sybren Stüvel is based on an experiment in Utrecht University’s MoCap laboratory. You can find the complete technical report here.

Here is another video about the crowd studies: