Basics of Animation

I'm trying to learn how to animate models - specifically robotic arms (some of you from halomaps have prolly seen the models). Anyway - I linked the arms together in a tree, and got the pivot points to the right places. But now I'm kinda lost. I would assume that there's some tutorials on this such as offspring's animated scenery tutorial... But to make it sync, it needs to be a device machine, and I have no idea how to create those...

So... where do I start with all this?

For devices just export as "device position.JMO."

Then you can pretty much just look at bungies doors to see how the device_machine tag is setup.

ok - so do I need two animations for the arms opening and closing? or can I just play the same animation backwards? And will the HAX exporter do JMO files?

No. device possision.JMO uses an Overlay because it uses the same anim for open and close, except it closes in reverse.