Flocking Implementation for the Blender Game Engine

In this thesis, we discuss the development of a new Boids system that simulates flocking behavior inside the Blender Game Engine and within the framework of the Real-Time Par- ticles System (RTPS) library developed by Ian Johnson. The collective behavior of Boids is characterized as an emergent behavior caused by following three steering behaviors: sep- aration, alignment, and cohesion. The implementation leverages OpenCL to maintain the portability of the Blender across different graphics cards and operating systems. Bench- marks of the RTPS-FLOCK system show that our implementation speeds up Blender's original Boids implementation (which only runs outside the game engine) by more than an order of magnitude. We demonstrate our boids system in three ways. First, we illustrate how symmetry of the steering behavior is maintained in time. Second, we consider the behavior of a "swarm of bees" approaching their hive. And third, we simulate the motion of a "crowd" constrained to a two-dimensional plane.