Genetic Programming Evolution of Controllers for 3-D Character Animation

The dominant paradigm for 3-D character animation requires an animator to specify the values for all degrees of freedom of an articulated figure at key frames. Specifying motion that is physically believable and biologically plausible is a tedious practice requiring great skill. We use evolutionary techniques (specifically Genetic Programming) as a means of controller synthesis for character animation. Controllers which drive a dynamic simulation of the character are evolved using the goals of the animation as an objective function, resulting in physically plausible motion. We discuss the development of objective functions used to guide the controller evolution, making reusable skill controllers, and comparisons of the convergence rates for different parameters of the evolutionary runs.