I dusted old ideas about making animations and now I have tried to remember how Blender works. I quickly tested (image attached, lol, sorry about hideous figure) how to use armature.

Then I tried to check something in Blender wiki and bumped into new stuff (crunch) and now I must wonder, there are huge amount of new shiny stuff there!  This Armature  Modifier is interesting, but I found no clue how to automatically rig ("Use Body Heat" or something like that) this modifier? Or must I (shudder) weight paint from scratch with this modifier?

...also, if someone knows some resources (good tutorials or something else usable) for simple animation, I'm certainly interested. I won't be using ready-made rigs, if I can avoid it, however.

Any ideas, or any thought to share?

Wow.. no one's answered your question yet.  Using Bone Heat is simple and works really well.  You may need to do some touch up with weight painting or editing it by hand in Mesh Edit mode.   But for the most part, it usually takes care of most if not all of your mesh.

It's simply a new option when you go to parent a mesh to an armature.

Mesh -> Parent to (CTRL P) -> Armature -> Select 'Create From Bone Heat'

Thanks, Reddog9, but I think I failed to clarify my question...

I know how to use Bone Heat in traditional way (parenting with Ctrl-P) but I thought that if you use the Armature MODIFIER (and not using the good old parenting at all) you still would have the same possibilities... However, if I'm completely confused, feel free to correct, I am known to misunderstand very clear intructions before... :lol:

So, the way you suggest, doesn't need the modifier itself at all. So what I'm asking, is simple explanation how to use this new modifier version of rigging/skinning.

Sorry, if I'm not making sense. Maybe I don't just see something obvious.

However, old style rigs work fine, so I'm content. Let's see what changes in the end of the month, when 2.5 is launched...