The V-EUPNEA Multidisciplinary Research Group (MRG) is associated with the Cyens Centre of Excellence. Research conducted by the group aims to utilise Computer Animation techniques to 'breath' life into virtual worlds. Emphasis is given on simulating virtual humans and crowds, as well as other animated entities such as animals and human transportation. The name of the group, comes from the Greek word ''εὔπνοια'' which means to breath with ease.

Our goal is to provide the means and utilities for the artists to design and populate virtual environments. To this end, we aim to create new methods and tools for artists to effectively populate virtual environments with high quality animated characters that are interacting seemlesly with their environments. We seek to explore these subjects both in the context of individual characters and collective crowds alike. Technologies such as motion capture, physically based animation, machine learning (e.g., reinforcement learning), computer vision and game engines are important in achieving our goals.


We are interested in:


Artist/User friendly methods to populate virtual environments

Crowd Simulations

Multi-agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for heterogeneous crowds

Scene understanding and interaction in the context of animation

Physically based control of virtual characters using machine learning

Editing and transferring style in computer animation

Simulating the interactions of pedestrians and vehicles

Procedural and/or data-driven generation of virtual humans

Efficient and realistic animation of large-scale (city level) crowds and traffic