Although I found plenty of information and really awesome tutorials about rigging, skinning and animation, I ran into some problems on the way to my first animation. So in this posting I list all my problems and the solutions / workarounds I found for them.

Failing To Insert Key Frames

With a very simple mesh and a 5 bone armature attached I was unable to insert any key frames. Pressing the I hot key leads to messages like either "No suitable context info for active Keying Set" or "Keying Set failed to insert any keyframes".

It depends on the setting in the dropdown list "Active Keying Set ..." in timeline editor.

If "Available" is set, the I hotkey does only work for bones having already an entry in the F-curve editor but failed if it is there very first key frame for this object. Delete it and it will do. But this is a nice feature if you have set up all objects you are interested in at the first frame and want to add frames for exactly these bones. Then you can pose your armature for a new frame, select all bones, hit I and only the relevant key frames will be inserted i.e. no new ones are created.

"ButtonKeyingSet" lets you insert keyframes via right mouse click in Properties panel if you hover the mouse over rotation, location, ... Other predefined keying sets like LocRot, ... do what they are supposed to do namely inserting works but is limited to what you have chosen.

No Interpolation of Key Frames

Having a basic understanding I started experimenting with a simple walk cycle. Setting up the start position (contact frame) at frame 1 I copied the pose and pasted opposite pose at 13 and same pose at 25. But my first run wasn't smooth at all: Staying at the contact pose for the first 12 frames and switching abruptly to the next pose in 13 and keeping it for the next 11 frames. Finally I found out that my user preferences / Editing / New F-Curve Defaults were set to constant instead of bezier:

The same applies to the curve interpolation type in F-Curve editor.

Things to Remember

Maybe this sounds silly but I came across these issues more than once.

• Given the case you want to split your animation into two (sub-) animations. For example a jump animation has to be split into a preparation and a flying phase. Take care to disable Only Insert Needed in user preferences when defining the trainsition frame. Otherwise your animation will show unexpected behaviour.
• Clear Parent for bones does not not work in pose mode but in edit mode.
• Pivot point settings apply to pose mode as well. If your rotation suddenly behave strange check whether you've changed pivot point before.