Rigging in Blender

Ok ... so I was going to try and use SmithMicro's Poser Pro 7 for my rigging and posing of 3D characters in Deadland Chronicles. I was also hoping I could use it to easily model out side characters and background characters without breaking a sweat. Sadly, for whatever reason, the demo crashes without warning or error message.

So, I'm back to working with Open Source programs such as makeHuman and Blender.

The sad thing is - i can't really find a really easy to follow tutorial on how to rig in Blender.

For those who are not aware what 'rigging' means, this is where you take a 3D character (such as the NeoTech soldier) and add armatures (or bones) to the model. Then, you can use the bones to move the body and pose him/her in various ways (walk, run, punch, jump, etc.). Poser has a slew of present poses so I was really hoping to use that program (despite the price) for posing.

So, if anyone out there can point me to good tutorials or show me how to rig/pose in Blender that would be amazing! I know there are a lot of Blender users out there .. so come now. Help a brotha out! Go to the contact page and drop me an email - I would forever be in your debt! Or at least really thankful!

Sidenote: I have figured out how to move characters and objects around a scene for rendering. Which is a huge deal for me. *crosses fingers* Hopefully Blender will end up the modeler of choice as well as the rigging and posing software. Would make life easier - and it works great with Silo (my modeler of choice).