I must confess I’ve been hit pretty hard on the head as of late, animations are a can of worms!
I thought I just had to put bones into my mesh to create the armature – or skeleton, or rig, all the same – and use any kind of pose editor to define all my poses, idle, running, attacking, dodging and so on.

Not so fast, young Padawan!
The easiest way to build a rig is to connect all the bones of an armature, which works fine but each bone has to be moved individually to create any pose.
That’s why IK – inverse kinematics – was invented which, in a nutshell, is a way to tell which bones move in conjunction with others.
It’s a fantastic technique, once an IK rig is correctly built, moving any part of the rig will move all other parts in a natural way.

The bad part is that I have – once more – to learn a new job to get all of this working.
The good part is that, as far as I can tell, animation is the last piece of the puzzle and once I am able to sculpt, texture, rig and animate a creature, I will have all the techniques needed to start building content.