Behavior planning for character animation

This paper explores a behavior planning approach to automatically generate realistic motions for animated characters. Motion clips are abstracted as high-level behaviors and associated with a behavior finite-state machine (FSM) that defines the movement capabilities of a virtual character. During runtime, motion is generated automatically by a planning algorithm that performs a global search of the FSM and computes a sequence of behaviors for the character to reach a user-designated goal position. Our technique can generate interesting animations using a relatively small amount of data, making it attractive for resource-limited game platforms. It also scales efficiently to large motion databases, because the search performance is primarily dependent on the complexity of the behavior FSM rather than on the amount of data. Heuristic cost functions that the planner uses to evaluate candidate motions provide a flexible framework from which an animator can control character preferences for certain types of behavior. We show results of synthesized animations involving up to one hundred human and animal characters planning simultaneously in both static and dynamic environments.

[1]  Nils J. Nilsson,et al.  A Formal Basis for the Heuristic Determination of Minimum Cost Paths , 1968, IEEE Trans. Syst. Sci. Cybern..

[2]  Craig W. Reynolds.  Flocks, herds, and schools: a distributed behavioral model , 1987, SIGGRAPH.

[3]  Jean-Claude Latombe,et al.  Planning motions with intentions , 1994, SIGGRAPH.

[4]  David C. Brogan,et al.  Animating human athletics , 1995, SIGGRAPH.

[5]  Zoran Popovic,et al.  Motion warping , 1995, SIGGRAPH.

[6]  Lance Williams,et al.  Motion signal processing , 1995, SIGGRAPH.

[7]  Ken Perlin,et al.  Improv: a system for scripting interactive actors in virtual worlds , 1996, SIGGRAPH.

[8]  J. Hahn,et al.  Interpolation Synthesis of Articulated Figure Motion , 1997, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[9]  Michael Gleicher,et al.  Retargetting motion to new characters , 1998, SIGGRAPH.

[10]  Michael F. Cohen,et al.  Verbs and Adverbs: Multidimensional Motion Interpolation , 1998, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications.

[11]  Zoran Popovic,et al.  Physically based motion transformation , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[12]  Sung Yong Shin,et al.  A hierarchical approach to interactive motion editing for human-like figures , 1999, SIGGRAPH.

[13]  Alberto Menache,et al.  Understanding Motion Capture for Computer Animation and Video Games , 1999 .

[14]  Michiel van de Panne,et al.  A grasp-based motion planning algorithm for character animation , 2001, Comput. Animat. Virtual Worlds.

[15]  Zvi Shiller,et al.  Planning motion patterns of human figures using a multi-layered grid and the dynamics filter , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[16]  Petros Faloutsos,et al.  The virtual stuntman: dynamic characters with a repertoire of autonomous motor skills , 2001, Comput. Graph..

[17]  Mark Mizuguchi,et al.  Data driven motion transitions for interactive games , 2001, Eurographics.

[18]  Nancy M. Amato,et al.  Roadmap-based flocking for complex environments , 2002, 10th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications, 2002. Proceedings..

[19]  Jessica K. Hodgins,et al.  Interactive control of avatars animated with human motion data , 2002, SIGGRAPH.

[20]  Christoph Bregler,et al.  Motion capture assisted animation: texturing and synthesis , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..

[21]  Okan Arikan,et al.  Interactive motion generation from examples , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..

[22]  Nancy S. Pollard,et al.  Efficient synthesis of physically valid human motion , 2003, ACM Trans. Graph..

[23]  Thierry Siméon,et al.  Eurographics/siggraph Symposium on Computer Animation (2003) Visual Simulation of Ice Crystal Growth , 2022 .

[24]  Sung Yong Shin,et al.  Planning biped locomotion using motion capture data and probabilistic roadmaps , 2003, TOGS.

[25]  Nancy S. Pollard,et al.  Evaluating motion graphs for character navigation , 2004, SCA '04.

[26]  Katsu Yamane,et al.  Synthesizing animations of human manipulation tasks , 2004, ACM Trans. Graph..

[27]  Jernej Barbic,et al.  Segmenting Motion Capture Data into Distinct Behaviors , 2004, Graphics Interface.

[28]  Jessica K. Hodgins,et al.  Synthesizing physically realistic human motion in low-dimensional, behavior-specific spaces , 2004, ACM Trans. Graph..

[29]  Jehee Lee,et al.  Precomputing avatar behavior from human motion data , 2004, SCA '04.

[30]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  Autonomous behaviors for interactive vehicle animations , 2004, SCA '04.

[31]  Katsu Yamane,et al.  Synthesizing animations of human manipulation tasks , 2004, SIGGRAPH 2004.

[32]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  Planning algorithms , 2006 .

[33]  Lucas Kovar,et al.  Motion Graphs , 2002, ACM Trans. Graph..