(Quickly flips over the 'Newbie' button) Dr Geep has a nice beginners tutorial for getting around in the keyframe ('dope sheet') and graph editors (your savior, though you know this not). So does PhilC. How -I- started was downloading a bunch of .BVH motion files from the web (Little Dragon has a pretty extensive list of URL's of freebie sites), loading them into a figure, opening the keyframe editor, and just running and watching to see what was happening. Then trying to change one thing, and seeing the result (One of the things you will discover immediately is 'Pretzel Power'; my little term for an improperly defined spline interpolation. Poser uses 2 types of animation processing; linear, which is just that-motion is applied without any kind of buffering, and on a frame by frame basis. A good example of linear interpolation would be what Ray Harryhausen did with Dynamation. You have to make the motion for each frame, and time it yourself to make it look realistic. Spline interpolation is actually 'time spline'; what this does is allow you to create a keyframe as a starting point for say an arm raising, then skip ahead to the frame where you want the arm raised to, move it to that position, and then the animation engine will interpolate all the frames in between, and adjust the speed of the change based on the frames per second, and the number of frames between the two keyframes. This can really speed up your work, but if the splines aren't set correctly, you'll find your model twisting itself into a work of Daliesque art on the tweening (term for what's going on between two keyframes in spline interpolation). This is usually easy to fix, and you can see what happened in the graph editor) The graph editor is just that; it shows one chosen function of a selected body part over the length of the animation. The handiness of it is you can spot keyframes that create chaos on spline interpolation, and do global translation. One thing you'll find with freebie .BVH files is that the idea of 'world center' changes a lot. Some files have the figures located just fine. Others have the hip at floor level (the hip is the root node of a bvh; where the hip goes, everything else follows, and references itself ultimately to the hip). What you can do with the graph editor is globally change the hip's Ytrans value to bring the figure up or down to the proper level by simply placing your cursor in the graph window and passing it slowly over a keyframe line. When it changes into an 'I' shape, hold down shift and drag the icon; the graph field should turn black. Once you've done this for the frames you want to change, release shift and the field should stay black. Move the cursor over the blackened graph, and hold down ctrl. The cursor should turn into a vertical double arrow. When it does, click and slide the mouse cursor up or down, and you should see the entire highlighted section translate up or down. If you have the graph off to the side, you should see your character slowly rising out of the ground. There really isn't an 'Animation for Dummies' out there....I've looked. Most of what you will find is specific to a particular high end package. Right here is the best source of Poser related animation expertise. Oh, once you get a feel for the controls, I'd suggest getting some of the Muybridge books. Back at the tail end of the 19th century, Eadweard Muybridge did a series of motion studies with still cameras. What you have is excellent for use as visual references for keyframe animating human and animal motion. The books I use the most are 'Animals In Motion' and 'The Human Figure In Motion'. You can get them from Amazon if nowhere else, and they have some bundled deals there as well (the human figures are nude, with a few studies done with a draping skirt or support for the males. And there is a section of children, so you can get that unique gait that toddlers seem to have, and the interesting ways they find to get onto chairs and the like).