The AnimaTricks system: Animating intelligent agents from high-level goal declarations

This paper presents AnimaTricks, a system for the generation of the behavior of an animated agent from a high level description of its goals. The deliberation component generates a sequence of actions given a set of goals. The animation component, then, translates it into an animation language, leaving to the animation engine the task of generating the actual animation. The purpose of the system is two-fold. First, we test how deliberation can be effectively tied to the animated counterpart. Second, by generating complex animations from high-level goals, AnimaTricks supports the work of directors and animators in a pre-visualization and re-use perspective.