Crowd Simulation (BSc Thesis)

For my bachelor’s thesis, I developed a terrain traversal model using differential geometry and implemented it in Houdini. The model evaluates paths on smooth height-map surfaces using costs derived from distance, surface normals, and heading directions. Changing the cost function produces different paths, such as the shortest route, the easiest climb, or a compromise between them.

To compute the paths, I discretized the continuous model into a weighted graph and used standard path-finding algorithms. The resulting paths are smoothed into motion curves. I evaluated the model in Houdini.