AbstractWe propose a simple and effective framework to deal with the problem of synthesizing interactive and competitive motions while reflecting the interactions. Two nontrivial issues are addressed in synthesizing two‐character motions in competitive environment: how to reveal the embedded routines while keeping visual reality and how to build interactive models based on singly captured motions. To solve these issues, we employ a hierarchical framework: the finite state machine (FSM) controls the state transition in the higher layer, and the hybrid approach controls the action selection in the lower layer. The proposed approach contains two folds: first, a rule‐based control scheme is proposed to simulate routine steps based on statistical analysis. Second, the interactive models are designed for simulating dense interactions between two players. The Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) algorithm is adopted to select attack styles and coupled with motion transition graph to determine combination blows. Here we apply the proposed framework of hybrid paradigm to boxing sport as an example. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.