Crowd simulation has been widely used in industry

architecture

transportation

and many other fields. To implement real-time crowd simulation in complex environments

efficiency is a pivotal problem to resolve. We meet a lot of challenges

such as rendering of large crowds

the update of crowd’s locations and states

as well as collision avoidance. We propose a field-based approach to implement real-time crowd simulation. This approach guides the crowd movements by constructing a navigation field and a density field. The navigation field can make the crowd choose the optimal path to reach the desired destinations. The density field can affect the velocity of the crowd to help avoid collisions

combined with a GPU-based collision avoidance method. Using our approach

we have constructed a real-time crowd simulation system and tested the performance in a large venue with thousands of agents. We succeed in simulating the evacuation of crowds with excellent rendering and high efficiency.