Behavioral animation is a type of procedural animation, which is a type of computer animation. In behavioral animation an autonomous character determines its own actions, at least to a certain extent. This gives the character some ability to improvise, and frees the animator from the need to specify each detail of every character's motion. These improvisational characters are, in the words of Ann Marion: "puppets that pull their own strings". An early example of behavioral animation was the 1987 boids model of bird flocking. While in some limited sense autonomous characters have a mind, their simplistic behavioral controllers are more closely related to the field of artificial life than to artificial intelligence.
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Last update: April 6, 1997