Hi Will M.--

Have you looked through the product manual available from the download site? There's  additional information on the animation system there that may be useful.

In general, my advice would be to start by getting a skeleton to animate properly, then implement skinning on top of that. First, make sure you have a system for drawing debug lines; this will let you test your skeletal animation in isolation. Next, add the code necessary to animate a skeleton, using one of the assets provided with the demos. I suggest referencing the demo "NormalBlendingDemo."

Once your skeleton animates properly, you need to implement skinning. You can extract skinning information from hkx* scene data, though the documentation is somewhat sparse. Presumably your game uses some form of model format, so it should be reasonable to export and import skinning data for each model using the same system. Skinning can be a challenging topic, so you're best off starting with very simple skinning schemes (a tesselated box skinned over two bones making a simple arm is a good first stab). Also, write your skinning algorithm in software before trying to implement it on the GPU - it will be much simpler to debug.

Please let me know if you have any specific questions about this topic.

--Tim