AbstractRecently, the dynamics of linked articulated rigid bodies has become a valuable tool for making realistic three‐dimensional computer animations. An exact treatment of rigid body dynamics, however, is based on rather non‐intuitive results from classical mechanics (e.g. the Euler equations for rotating bodies) and it relies heavily on sophisticated numerical schemes to solve (large) sets of coupled non‐linear algebraic and differential equations. As a result, articulated rigid bodies are not yet supported by most real‐time animation systems. This paper discusses an approach to rigid body dynamics which is based on (both conceptually and algorithmically much simpler) point mechanics; this gives rise to an asymptotically exact numerical scheme (NSI) which is useful in the context of real‐time animation, provided that the number of degrees of freedom of the simulated system is not too large. Based on NSI, a second scheme (NS2) is derived which is useful for approximating the motions of linked articulated rigid bodies; NS2 turns out to be sufficiently fast to give at least qualitative results in real‐time simulation. In general, the algorithm NS2 is not necessarily (asymptotically) exact, but a quantitative analysis shows that in the absence of reaction forces it conserves angul