Emotion in flocking

Behavioral animation is a category of computer animation that enables objects to determine their own actions. This saves an animator from having to determine every detail of movement for each object in the animation. As the number of objects within an animation increases, specifying the position of each object becomes increasingly difficult. Flocking is an example of behavioral animation. Some examples of flocking can be seen in movies, such as the stampede of the antelopes in The Lion King, the herds of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and the massive battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings. In this project, I have enhanced flocking to convey emotion. This is achieved using only the movement of objects in relationship to one another. The effectiveness of the flock s motion in conveying a given emotion is judged by human observers via an on-line flocking system. This system allows users to rate how well an emotion is conveyed by the flock. User feedback is used to further adjust motion parameters with the goal of obtaining the best representative motion for each emotion