Traditional inverse kinematics systems are riddled with issues that make their use in real-time simulations prohibitive. Foremost, the computational costs associated with these methods are too high to make their widespread use practical. Furthermore, their usage typically results in the synthesis of animations that fail to impart the sense of weight and timing that would be present in either motion captured or artist created forward kinematic animation. This is a byproduct of using a mathematical technique to solve an artistic problem.

A new method we have developed succeeds in overcoming these shortcomings. By using a database of predefined animation poses, a new animation can be derived to achieve the desired pose. At its simplest, the technique can be used to manually control a character's gaze for simulating environmental awareness as well as directing a character's gun to point in the desired direction for aiming or shooting. It does all of this and more without burdening the CPU and can be easily enhanced using hardware skinning for optimal performance.