Authoring Multi-actor Behaviors in Crowds with Diverse Personalities

Multi-actor simulation is critical to cinematic content creation, disaster and security simulation, and interactive entertainment. A key challenge is providing an appropriate interface for authoring high-fidelity virtual actors with feature-rich control mechanisms capable of complex interactions with the environment and other actors. In this chapter, we present work that addresses the problem of behavior authoring at three levels: Individual and group interactions are conducted in an event-centric manner using parameterized behavior trees, social crowd dynamics are captured using the OCEAN personality model, and a centralized automated planner is used to enforce global narrative constraints on the scale of the entire simulation. We demonstrate the benefits and limitations of each of these approaches and propose the need for a single unifying construct capable of authoring functional, purposeful, autonomous actors which conform to a global narrative in an interactive simulation.