Principles of Gaze and Arm Animation: Can We Apply Them to Animated Agents?
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Principles of Gaze and Arm Animation: Can We Apply Them to Animated Agents? Tomislav Pejsa 1. Introduction A central objective in character animation is to make characters believable in their behavior and clear in their communication with the viewer. Professional animators rely on empirical principles, derived through decades of practice, to animate their characters in a way that clearly conveys their intentions, emotions, and personalities. Even with these established principles as guidance, production of hand-authored animation is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and requires a great amount of skill. However, there is a growing need for animation outside the domain of professional production. Availability of low-cost animation tools and devices [8, 24] is putting animation production within reach of novices. Potential applications of novice animation include producing instructional and demonstration videos with animated virtual agents, in the vein of similar live action videos on YouTube, but benefiting from the visual clarity and flexibility afforded by animation, as well as synthesis of movements of virtual agents and social robots which interact with human users as autonomous assistants [3], customer service representatives [19], and coworkers in settings such as manufacturing [1]. The character’s gaze behavior and arm movements are of particular importance in such applications of animation. Eye movements, head turns, and body posture shifts in gaze are important for communicating the character’s focus of attention and supporting a variety of conversational functions, such as facilitating better engagement and information recall in the viewer [22] and managing turn-taking in dialogue [20]. Arms movements are needed for gestures, which complement spoken dialogue and contribute to its efficiency [10], and they are also the agent’s means of interacting with objects in the virtual or physical world shared with the viewer. Methods for computational synthesis of gaze and arm movements focus largely on simulating human movements or, in the realm of robotics, on synthesizing movements that are as efficient as 1 possible for the task at hand. However, in traditional animation these movements are often exaggerated beyond what is biologically plausible in order to enhance the expressiveness and clarity of the character’s actions. Computer animation researchers have proposed methods that automatically apply some animation principles to synthesized motion (e.g., adding anticipation [11, 26], ease-in and ease-out [13], and squash and stretch [26]), but these methods usually focus on a small subset of principles and do not explicitly consider gaze and arm movements. Furthermore, animated agents often have simple designs and limited communication affordances. This is particularly pronounced in the realm of social robotics, where technological limitations and prohibitive cost mandate simple, minimalist designs. Many humanlike robots lack mobile eyes and have only limited mobility in the body, arms, and hands [18], while other robots have nothing but arms at their disposal (robotic arms used in manufacturing [25]). Yet even limited agents need to interact with humans, as collaborators, assistants, educators. Humans need to understand their goals and intentions, to feel comfortable in their presence, to feel engagement and even rapport in mutual interactions. This depth of social involvement can only be achieved if the agent’s behavior is believable and intuitively comprehensible. Traditional animation offers solutions to the problem of saying more with less. Characters in animated films, even those with very stylized designs, are able to communicate clearly through the use of expressive movements and acting. Rather than try to accurately reproduce human movement, traditional animation abstracts away some of the detail of human movement and exaggerates other aspects in order to achieve motion that is both aesthetically more pleasing and more effective in conveying the character’s personality and state of mind. To apply the principles of traditional animation to 3D computer animation, we must first know what those principles are. However, information about the practices of professional animators is often not readily available. Practices and traditions tend to vary from person to person and from studio to studio; animators and studios tend to have unique practices and tricks that support their distinctive style. The secrets of their craft, if publicly available at all, are often scattered across animation books, online tutorials, articles, blog posts, interviews, and other sources. As part of this work, I have surveyed principles of character design, movement, and acting in traditional animation as they apply to the problem of animating gaze and arms of animated agents. In my research I have consulted a number of works of animation literature [9, 28, 2, 15, 16, 27] and ancillary resources such as animation blogs and video tutorials to obtain insights into how 2 animators achieve gaze and arm movements that look believable and communicate clearly. While synthesizing these insights into a paper I have tried to remain relevant to the problem of authoring animations for 3D characters and embodied agents, presenting the information in a form that is understandable and actionable to non-artist experts in the fields of computer animation and human- computer interaction. These experts could make use of the provided information to inspire and inform the development of computational animation techniques, enabling them to make their characters, virtual agents, and robots look and communicate better in a broad range of applications. 2. Principles of Gaze and Arm Animation I classify principles of animation into three categories: (1) character design principles, (2) principles of movement, and (3) principles of acting. Character design principles specify how the character should be designed to achieve a particular personality and communication style with gaze and arm movements. Principles of movement are concerned with basic techniques of animating the character’s movements such that they look believable and visually pleasing, while acting principles specify how to use these movements together in order to communicate clearly the character’s personality, emotions, status, and intents. 2.1 Principles of Character Design Gaze and arm behaviors engage not just the eyes and arms, but the entirety of the character’s body. The character conveys its focus of attention by turning its eyes, head, neck, and often whole body towards the target of interest. When the character gestures in dialogue or manipulates an object, the desired communicative effect is achieved through coordinated movements and attitudes of the hands, arms, and body. Therefore, when designing a character that will communicate using gaze and arm motion, it is important to consider the design of all these body parts. 3 Figure 1: Basic head and eye design in animation. Image source: [2]. A basic principle of designing appealing characters is to use curves and rounded forms [2]. The basic design of the character is composed of multiple solid, rounded forms connected together at socket points. Construction of the head–a key body part in gaze–typically begins with an oval ball or egg shape, with eyes drawn in the top hemisphere (Figure 1). This base shape is mostly rigid – it rotates and translates during movement, but it does not deform much. Additional features of the head, such as eyes, cheeks, snout, and mouth are more flexible and give expressivity to head movements through squash and stretch deformations and overlapping action. Eyes are typically designed as circles or ovals that represent eyeballs, since that is a shape that looks appealing and offers the most opportunity for expressive movement [9]. The circle contains the pupil and gaze is communicated through movement of the pupil within the white of the eye. Some characters, such as Winnie Pooh, have simple eyes with just the pupils, but no whites. Such eye designs are restrictive, because eyes cannot wander across the face and the whole head must turn in gaze shifts. Despite this restriction, animators were able to make Winnie Pooh come alive through head movements, body attitudes, and hand gestures. The example of Winnie Pooh illustrates how an anatomically simple character is still capable of rich communication and it is particularly instructive to designers working with embodied agents without mobile eyes. Similar principles apply to arm and hand design as well. The hand is composed of a base oval shape representing the palm, which has a thumb and fingers attached to it [2]. Classic Disney animal characters such as Mickey Mouse have four fingers on each hand (including the thumb), while more realistic human characters have five. Blair [2] recommends placing fingers unevenly to avoid monotony. Walt Stanchfield, former Disney animator and animation instructor, provided a set of guidelines for modeling arms [9]. He recommended using straight lines for bony parts of the arm that pull tight when bent, while curves should be used for fleshy, muscular parts that bend inward. The combined use of straights against curves makes for a more visually interesting design and it can also convey personality; e.g., wicked witch, an archetypical character in animated films, has gnarly, twisted hands with sharp, extruding nails. 4 Proportions of the body are a powerful cue to the character’s personality [2]. An archetypical “cute” character is proportioned