Scene Blocking Utilizing Forces.

Positioning characters in virtual environments currently requires manual work and human intervention to complete. Many applications focus primarily on producing nonverbal behaviors and interacting one-on-one with humans. The problem is that most applications, especially games, are very interactive experiences. They introduce a human factor where a character (the human) may choose not to follow a predefined script, yet an author needs to be able to accommodate the unexpected movements when blocking their AI characters. Here, we look to our prior work on positioning characters in these types of virtual environments to create an AI Director to pre-block a play-script. In addition, we incorporate a force-directed graph component to assist with positioning the AI characters when there is a human-controlled character involved. Forcedirected graphs have been shown to position objects aesthetically for large and complex graphs. We rely upon this feature to assist with adjusting pre-defined play-script blocking to include the human-controlled character, making the human appear to be moving correctly even when they are not. Finally, we evaluate this approach based on occlusion and clustering analysis to show its effectiveness in balancing a production and incorporating a human-controlled character.