Well, let me elaborate a bit. I'm a technical guy. In my spare time I'm working on this game engine of mine, currently the skeletal animation part. So, not only do I make slow progress, I also don't have an art department at my hand... and while I can setup a little test model manually, or model one in Blender and export it to my file format... it's still meant for game programming, not to animate some cube by moving a corner around or something like that.

Is there a collection of downloadable (don't really care what format, if it's either documented or blender can import it... once the animation part works I might make a few converters anyway to get stuff like 3ds into my file format) models somewhere that are a bit "better" than what I can do? With a skeleton structure, and preferably an animation track or two?

And believe me, if it looks like its from a game 50 years back, it's still better :-) Don't care about licenses, this is not meant for an actual game, just to have something nicer moving around for debugging and trying out things.

[ Come to think of it... Microsoft has the "Tiny" model in their samples. It's probably a .x file, but if I can find information on that... I guess I'll put that on my ToDo list Still, other suggestions, anyone? ]

EDIT: a bit of a setback here... while Blender appears to load X-files, it seems to ignore the animation. Not sure about the textures either... either way, two more subprojects... currently writing a generic x-file parser, followed by a converter...

I would suggest you google "free 3D models" You'll find a bunch of websites where you can download games models from.

Most likely you will not be able to find a fully rigged 3D model that you can just import and use. What you will be able to find are 3D models that are READY to be rigged by you.

I don't use Blender myself so I don't know the exact steps you would need to take to animate a model, but in Maya this is what I do.
* Import model
* add bones to skeletal structure of the model
* bind the bones to the 3d mesh
* create key frames for my animation using the bones
* fine tune the binding process of each bone as I animate to make sure that I don't get weird folded geometry
* Once I have a rig built then I can generate the animations that I need for my game
* export animated key frame data for my model to my own game format
* Test in game engine

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