P. Dannenmann and H. Barthel (Germany)
Cognitive Characters, Character Animation, Action Plan ning, Animation Generation
The animation of virtual human characters using tradi tional keyframing techniques is a cumbersome and time consuming process. We present an approach to facili tate this process by utilizing so-called cognitive characters. These characters govern what they know, how that knowl edge is acquired, and how it can be used to plan actions. On this basis we present a technique to incorporate the "Cog nitive Modeling Language" (CML) into an animation sys tem to describe a set of actions the character is able to per form and the character's high level goals on a logical level. The action planning for the character is performed based on these logical descriptions in a STRIPS-like manner. Addi tionally, the character's knowledge about its environment is taken into account for the planning process. As a result we get a sequence of the character's actions that enable it to fulfill the specified goals. This action sequence is finally used to automatically generate a corresponding animation from animation fragments that are smoothly joined to get the complete animation sequence.
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