Autonomous animation of human figures using intelligent agents

The task of animating human characters is complex and has many degrees of freedom. There is an obvious need to provide a consistent framework to organize the knowledge and tools required so that the creative, intelligent animator working together with a series of reasoning systems, can quickly develop a complex animation. We investigate an approach in which the animator works with a system which provides a hierarchy of tools; these include keyframing supported by inverse kinematics, procedural modules for common movements, an agent based approach for low level constraints, and a high level constraint reasoner which plans the overall animation. In this paper we describe the agent based approach and discuss how the animator can interact with it.