Quote Originally Posted by jcustis View Post
Someone I know loosely from the Lightfighter.net board is a computer graphics animation guy who works on Hollywood production, and is a CA Reservist with time in Iraq. I mentioned this thread to him and he replied with the link, which appears to be software he and his kin use to create environments and characters.

http://www.massivesoftware.com/whatismassive/

Is there a difference between crowd modelling and animation?
There is a difference between the two. The animation stuff is the representation of the mathmatics behind the crowd modeling. There a variety of epidemiology simulations that show infection rates (you see them in the bad sci-fi movies poorly showing density and infection rates). A lot of the crowd modeling software follows infection rates only the infection is an idea or emotion. There are a lot of other factors that go into the "what" of the animation.

Thinking about bad sci-fi movies and patterns of movement. In the bad sci-fi movies they show infection spreading rapidly as a wave form across the nation. That is usually far from the truth. Reality is you get corridors of infection following road systems between large city centers, and jumps from air travel to the hub cities. Not take a look at crowd dynamics.

A crowd must follow physical ground paths. So waves and other patterns aren't going to work. Hydraulic theories of pressure and concentration help to inform crowd movement theorist though. Other things that help in imagining what needs to be animated are issues such as incident, obstructions, distance to injury ratio's, and even things like mental state. A good simulation allows you to easily adjust those parameters like in the infection simulations you can adjust regions of the map for population distance, technology level, etc (All those hofstedder elements).

I don't know if that helps at all, but there is some GIS stuff coming from Google that is supposed to mimic these type of questions pretty close.