Skinned mesh

Hi to all, where can I find information about skinned mesh, and how can be implemented animation in DirectX 8.0? I have a character (a collection of meshes, one for each part I want to animate), and I want to assign to it different animations (walking, jumping, running, etc...) I think I should have a hierarcy of matrices for each keyframe and interpolate, but I''d like to read something more detailed... thanks to all, P.S.: I looked at the skinned mesh example in the DX SDK, but I have some doubt about having more than 1 animation set... Is the DX sample in the SDK good? They all use D3DX, I''m not sure if it''s the best choice (know little about it)