US Patent 10403018 Swarm crowd rendering system

Embodiments of systems and methods described herein are configured to render a group of virtual entities during runtime of a game application with varied appearances and animations. The virtual entities may be composed of multiple elements. The systems and methods may provide a toolbox which can configure the characteristics of the elements and/or the background characters, such as appearances, locations, and animations. During runtime of the game application, the systems and methods can automatically select and vary the characteristics based on the configurations provided by the toolbox. The systems and methods can further render elements of the background characters in batches based on similarities of the elements.