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They get red when they actually transform to "full" NPCs with proper collision, AI and everything. Obviously in the real game they will look different and not be placed in a grid 😅 They will also have hair (oh god help me)

Full NPCs can push each other with proper animations and physics, but I also had to make crowd characters somewhat pushable as well. They act like these silly balls. I put them to an implicit grid (one of my fav acceleration structures, can store 1 NPC per bit per row/column!)

From Unity perspective each crowd NPC is just 1 non-skinned gameobject. Could even use instancing, but even without it it's pretty fast with SRP batching. All animation is purely in a vertex shader. Quats are read from an rgba16half texture.