It's the precise nodes you need that seems to be amiss. You can look at the block guy character in torque show tool all you want but it still doesn't answer all the questions, like what the forget the ski nodes do and how the cam/eye nodes work. Also how to designate your character's feet so he doesn't spawn with his lower body submerged into the ground. This is the stuff I got stuck on.
Animations do work well however, and you can start testing a player character once you complete the Base character with all the nodes you think you need, export it under dts, then export a seperate dsq file of the model simply called root.dsq. Then, you can rename all the important movement animations to a temporary root.dsq and try to figure out what the hell is wrong with you model and which nodes aren't working, or missing.
One super important thing is that All .dsq files need to contain the same nodes/important shapes as the parent .dts, otherwise the game will crash when you try to spawn the character.
Also, animation sequences can be called via script I'm pretty sure, so you can add as many sequences as you want for extra animations. But, you model will still need a set of basic movement animations, or atleast the movements it will be restricted to using (see tank turret and why it forgeted your game when you tried spawning it on it's own, half the sequences are missing)
