Evaluating Emotive Character Animations Created with Procedural Animation

How to create effective body animations for virtual agents with emotions remains the state of the art for human animators and a great challenge for computer scientists. In this paper, we propose to use a model of hierarchal parameters to represent body animations:

emotional

,

style

,

motion,

and

procedural

parameters. Based on this model, we have created motions for a virtual character with generic animation procedures and mapped these procedural parameters into style parameters as proposed in the literature. The expressiveness of the generated animations was verified through experiments in our previous work. In this paper, we further report the results of two experiments attempting to verify how the style parameters are mapped into various emotions. The results reveal that the participants can successfully distinguish emotions based on the manipulation of style parameters for neutral motions such as walking. When these style parameters were used for emotive motions, including pounding, shivering, flourishing and crestfallen, the generated animations were even more effective for intended contexts.