Behaviourally rich actions for user-controlled characters

Abstract

The increasing use of animated characters and avatars in computer games and 3D online worlds requires increasingly complex behaviour with increasingly simple and easy to use control systems. This paper presents a system for user-controlled actions that aims at simplicity and ease of use while being enhanced by modern animation techniques to produce rich and complex behaviour. We use inverse kinematics based motion adaptation to make pre-existing pieces of motion apply to new targets. The expressiveness of the character is enhanced by adding autonomous behaviour, in this case eye gaze behaviour. This behaviour is generated autonomously but is still influenced by the actions that the user is requesting the character to perform. The actions themselves are simple for a designer with no programming experience to design and for an end user to customise. They are also very simple to invoke.