Animation Guides? Do they exist?

First of all, Hello everyone!

I was wondering if there was a halfway readable guide to creating character animations.

I've been trying to use Nifskope/Blender...but...

Well...I consider myself a pretty smart guy. I majored in chemistry/biology. I'm good with numbers and all that.

But this...this stuff is a whole new level of wtf...

I must have raged slammed my keyboard at least half a dozen times today.

I've been through the Blender Noob-to-Pro guide...made the block dude, made the bouncing ball animation...

I mean, I'm having the hardest time just learning the controls, its always like alt+shift+;/ LFM something or another.

I'm just trying do to an IDLE animation using the skeleton.nif, and its impossible.

Anyone got any pointers? I've only seen about 3 or 4 people make good animations, and now I see why. Its extremely difficult.

I know Seph uses MoCap...but I don't think that's an option for me.

I guess to further clarify...

I do my best learning by reverse engineering a problem, or watching someone else do it.

The only problem is, I can't load a finished animation on any program I have.

I can load a .kf file into nifscope, but the animation itself doesn't play out on screen. Its just the XYZ axes and all the controllers. So I have no clue what I'm editing.

I can load a .nif into Blender, but no .kf. So neither one of these is a big help.

I need a program to view the animations, IN animation. I need to look at a final product, break it down, and dissect it.

Is there any such program?

What game do you want to create animations for?

Oblivion.

I can create armatures in a mesh, parent them, and frame them in an animation.

But I can't do the same with the default Oblivion skeleton.nif.

I've been watching some of Supr3boy's tutorials at nystic.com, and that's helped out a bit, but these are usually just general tutorials about making animations from scratch.

But all I'm trying to do is manipulate an already existing skeleton into specific poses.

Read this if you haven't already, it might be useful.