H. Barthel and P. Dannenmann (Germany)
Character Animation, Cognitive Characters, Action Plan ning, Animation Generation
The animation of human characters has been an important topic of research for several years. One important research objective in that domain is currently the simplification of the generation of such animations, since the traditional keyframing techniques are laborious and time-consuming. We present an approach to facilitate this process by utiliz ing so-called cognitive characters. These characters gov ern what they know, how that knowledge is acquired, and how it can be used to plan their actions. On this basis we present a technique to incorporate the "Cognitive Model ing Language" into an animation system to describe a set of actions the character is able to perform and the charac ter's high level goals on a logical level. As a result we get a sequence of the character's actions that fulfills these goals. This action sequence is finally used to automatically gen erate a corresponding animation from animation fragments that are smoothly joined to get the complete animation se quence. In order to permit a high level of interaction capa bilities for the user, he can not only control the character's actions on the cognitive level, he has also got additional ca pabilities to assign predefined behavior patterns to the char acter or directly assign actions for immediate execution.
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