As video games have moved to 3d, a number of techniques have emerged to create game animations that are more tailored to the environment, to make game characters feel less like autonomous pawns floating through environments and more like grounded characters touching the world around them. This largely revolves around Animation Blending and Inverse Kinematics (IK for short).

3d game characters are typically animated using a skeleton made of bones. Animators create animations by moving these bones, then the character’s mesh will deform relative to which polygons are controlled by those bones, rotating in the direction specified. This allows animators to move characters around without having to manually control every single vertex in the mesh.

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