Browsing by Author "Sohre, Nick"

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    Data-Driven Variation for Virtual Facial Expressions
    (2017-03-16) Sohre, Nick; Adeagbo, Moses; Guy, Stephen
    Animating digital characters has an important role in computer assisted experiences, from video games to movies to interactive robotics. A critical component of digital character interaction is the animation of the human face. Here we explore a data-driven method to produce variation in animated smiles. We define a low-dimensional parameter space for learning based on key feature points of the face, which generalizes to arbitrary digital models. We perform a large-scale user study to annotate a systematic sweep of faces, and train a non-parametric classifier to predict the level of perceived happiness. This model is tuned to balance between precision and the variation in its predictions. New happy faces are then sampled from this model, resulting in a variety of generated faces that display a targeted level of happiness. This diversity can allow rich interactions with digital characters to be built automatically, without the need for hand-crafted expressions.
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    Generating Sokoban Puzzle Game Levels with Monte Carlo Tree Search
    (2016-04-20) Kartal, Bilal; Sohre, Nick; Guy, Stephen
    In this work, we propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search based approach to procedurally generate Sokoban puzzles with varying sizes. We propose two heuristic metrics surrounding box path congestion and level terrain to guide the search towards interesting puzzles. Our method generates puzzles through the simulated game play itself, guaranteeing solvability in all generated puzzles. Our algorithm is efficient, capable of generating challenging puzzles very quickly (generally in under a minute) for varying board sizes. The ability to generate puzzles quickly allows our method to be applied in a variety of applications such as procedurally generated mini-games and other puzzle-driven game elements.