Chapter 15: Rendering Instanced Crowds
This final chapter explores how to render large crowds using instancing. Crowd rendering is an interesting topic because it moves pose generation (sampling) and blending onto the GPU, making the entire animation pipeline run in a vertex shader.
To move pose generation to the vertex shader, animation information needs to be encoded in a texture. The focus of this chapter will be encoding animation data into textures and using that texture to create an animated pose.
Without instancing, drawing a large crowd would mean making lots of draw calls, which would hurt the frame rate. Using instancing, one mesh can be drawn many times. If there is only one draw call, the animated poses for each character in the crowd will need to be generated differently.
In this chapter, you will explore moving animation sampling into the vertex shader in order to draw large crowds. The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Storing arbitrary...
