Everything you mentioned is pretty close to what I had in mind. I had hoped to use the Alien animations as a ground work, but the package I downloaded from Epic contains only the mesh and skeletons, without any of the animatons. So clearly, if I don't want to bring everything again from scratch, I'll have to import over Draco2's old animations. I tried to use Biped to make a skeleton, but their skeletons appear to have all kinds of locked motion and scale features that I can't seem to find a way to work around. (I HATE overly complex software)
What you've seen on the website is just a preliminary version of the mesh, not the finished one. I want Draco3 to be the most prefect creation I can make, so there's alot of small adjustments I've been making. I'm also adjust some vertexs to match where I want the bones to be. I might not even be able to use Draco2's skeleton, if I can make it match my needs exactly. And regardless, there's ALOT of bones I must add for all of the speical facial features.
So right now, there's no animations to show. I haven't even begun adding the real bone structure, although I did make some tests using the Alein bone structure that didn't work out very well. I still need to learn and pratice exporting out new skeletonal animations, but baring any really big disasters, I think I'll have some animations for Sonic in a few days. Sometime after that, I'll probly work on the skin.
I might take some time off to finish the Bubble-Gun model I had started months ago. I'm not going to push really hard yet on making models until I've got hang of it all. I'll try to keep the website up to date though.