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Behavior Planning for Character Animation Heads: James Kuffner and Manfred Lau Contact: Manfred Lau (mlau@cs.cmu.edu) Mailing address: Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Associated center: CFR Associated lab/group: Planning and Autonomy Lab For more information, see this project's homepage.

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Project Description

This project 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.

Personnel

	Name	Title	Email Address
	James Kuffner	Assistant Professor	kuffner@cs.cmu.edu
	Manfred Lau	PhD Student, CS	mlau@cs.cmu.edu

Publications

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Behavior Planning for Character Animation
  M. Lau and J. Kuffner
  In Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, August, 2005. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [3700 KB] copyrighted