Procedural animation

In video games, it is often used for simple or complex actions such as turning a character's head whenever a player looks around (as in Quake III Arena) or ragdoll physics, which is usually used for the death of a character in which the ragdoll will realistically fall to the floor.

A ragdoll usually consists of a series of connected rigid bodies that are programmed to have Newtonian physics acting upon them; therefore, very realistic effects can be generated that would very hardly be possible with traditional animation.

For example, a character can die slumped over a cliff and the weight of its upper-body can drag the rest of it over the edge.

In the game Unreal Tournament 3, bodies who have gone into ragdoll mode to fake death can arise from any position into which they have fallen and get back on their feet.

The canceled Indiana Jones game from LucasArts shown at E3 2006 featured character motions that were animated entirely in real-time, with characters dodging, punching, and reacting to the environment based on an engine called Euphoria by NaturalMotion which has since been used in games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Backbreaker.