Abstract
Recently there has been an increased interest in using a large number of virtual characters in 3D Animation. However, editing an animation with a large number of different characters is a time-consuming procedure. The technique of “Behavior Animation” provides some automatic solutions to help animators to deal with various types of group behavior. In this study we confine ourselves to the group behavior with emotional convergence. First we propose a model of “Casual Crowd” according to convergence theory of crowd psychology. Our study focuses on how emotion affects on group behavior. We not only consider the influence of each individual’s emotion but also take into account the global factors such as the distribution of convergence centers in the environment and their corresponding crowd sizes. Following the line of existing models such as: “BDI Model”, “OCC Model” and “Emotional Appraisal Theory”, we propose a novel computation model for group behavior. The experiment results show that our model can effectively synthesize very natural animations of group behavior with emotional convergence.