Abstract
In recent years, with the fast growth of computer technology, both in hardware and software, the applications of the 3D computer animation have become increasingly wild spread. As more and more resources have put into the 3D animations, the need of crowd simulation software becomes evident. A crowd simulation software can produce a group of intelligent characters to demonstrate certain crowd behaviors according to embedding rules. Therefore it not only can save the productions cost but also produce gigantic virtual crowd that are impossible to have in real world. For example, the famous film “Ring of Lord” has used the crowd simulation software “Massive” during their production process.In this study, we focus on simulating crowd behavior with emotional contagion for computer animations. By exploiting the contagion theories from psychology, sociology, and the study of popular crowd mind as our base knowledge, we propose a novel computation model for simulating emotional contagion. We combined Le Bon’s theory and Gratch and Marsella’s model to form the basis of our computational structure.The proposed emotion contagion model is composed of two layers: the layer of emotion expression and the layer of behavior expression. In the first layer, we use cellular automata to build the relationship of cells. Then, we display the contagion behaviors among neighbors in the second layer. Some empirical examples are given to show the effectiveness of t our approach, that is, it can simulate many different kinds of contagion group behaviors.