Hello everybody,

First off I'm not really sure if this is the right board but let's hope it is

I'm working on animation for my engine, basically i'm planning to make 3 types: normal keyframed animation, skeletal animation (pre-defined frames of bones) and the environment-interactive skeletal animation.
So basically, my API will have a set of functions responsible for moving bones depending on the environment, for example, if there's a wall on the character's right, i can call hxSkeleton::SetBoneChainTarget ( baseRightArmBone, rightHandBone, wallPosition ); so it tries to move all bones between baseRightArmBone and rightHandBone so that rightHandBone touches the "wallPosition", same thing with legs, which can give better results while moving up stairs, for example.
The question is, has this been done before? where can i read more about it? would be better than starting all over from scratch, also is it practical? Is it better than pre-defined frames?

It's something called inverse kinematics, and it's a fairly well-understood (if complex) problem domain.

Thank you for pointing that out, InvalidPointer ( sounds wrong, eh? ), i found alot of information on it, guess that's all i needed .