Modeling Animation Out of Behaviored Graphical Components

Modeling Animation Out of Behaviored Graphical Components

Abstract

Almost all animate and inanimate entities we see around us change with time. The changes are brought about by changes in the values of their attributes. By using a set of parameters to represent the variable attributes of an entity, and by suitably manipulating their values at run-time, the behavior of an entity can be broadly mimicked in animation. The majority of entities are however all too complex to animate directly. They are better described in terms of smaller and simpler entities, which we call components. Each component is structurally and behaviorally complete and can be described independent of its application. In the present talk, we propose a scheme for 3D animation that broadly follows this line. The keystone of this scheme is a language, nicknamed 'V', which defines the structural and visual attributes of each component of the scene and associates a parameterized behavior with it, if necessary, in the form of a program script. Thereafter, wherever such a component appears, it does so with a built-in behavior, which can nevertheless be regulated by its higher-level component through its parameters. The advantage is that an entire animation can be modeled in a declarative fashion in terms of nested behaviored components. Besides, each component is easy to write, alter and reuse. The effort for development, debugging and maintenance of animation modeled in this way is much less as the concerns are almost always local.