Abstract
Group animation technique has been used by producers of animations and movies for a long time because it can reduce the expenditure of temporary actors. However, making all these group effects by hand takes animators a lot of time and effort. As a result, some animation software try to provide solutions for group behavior animation, and many researchers are working hard to make this kind of simulation more effective and real. We focus on simulating group behavior with emotional contagion for animation. In order to have real results, we use psychology as our base knowledge of how group behave in emotional contagion situations. Emotional contagion is a special phenomenon where people tend to have similar emotion and behaviors as others beside them. In 2000, James and Keike proposed their model of emotional contagion. We combined their model with Gratch and Marsella’s computational emotion model as our new emotional model for simulating group behavior with emotional contagion. Besides, we use cellular automata to build the relationship of agents. By adjusting CA rules, different kinds of results will come out. We also analyze the parameters users could change to have various simulation results. After building our emotional contagion model, we implement some situations in Alias Maya for testing. The testing results show that our model could actually produce animation of group behavior with emotional contagion. By using cellular automata, we reduce the complexion of group simulation. But because of the reasonable parameters we add in the simulation based on psychology, the results can be more realistic.