Animating Dolly: real-time herding and rendering of sheep

Abstract

This paper describes ongoing work on a system to animate and render large flocks of furry or woolly animals. An outside agent, the sheepdog, tries to control another group of agents (a flock of sheep) that observe two rules of flocking: cohesion and separation. We also describe our efforts to create realistic animations for the dog and sheep, using insights from animal gait studies, along with our system to render the large woolly flock in realtime using multi-view impostors with color variation.