Reality Factory

Hi. I'd like to know how exactly you should animate a gun, using ANY modeling program (I'm using XSI Mod Tool v6, btw. And if that won't work Blender).

If you know a tutorial, please post it, but what I'm really asking is:

• What movement should the gun make?
• How do you make a muzzleflash appear and dissapear? Or is this done through scripting?
• If you animate, how do yo add different animations (more than 1), because it seems to me that most modeling programs only have animations for movies and stuff.

Thanks!

The best gun firing animations are actually have the gun rotate downward briefly before kicking back.