Animation in Blender is pretty good. There are some YouTube videos which demonstrate it. It is best to view them; there are a lot of time saving shortcuts demonstrated, such as creating mirrored bone names and creating automatic keyframes.
You have to create an armature; then extrude the bones (CTRL Left Click / or E key) into your characters shape. (Only one side, perhaps the left arm, legs and shoulders). The other side can derive from a mirrored duplication.
The bones have to be named to matching vertex groups if exporting in .X format.
If you have mirrored you model using the mirror modifier; save a new version file version (for backup) and apply it; you will need to pose the mirrored side seperately. If you are exporting for DBPRO then check out my
export guide.