Anim8or Community

So what exactly do you want help with?  You can't get it to look right?  Nobody can help if you don't provide any pictures and don't tell us anymore.  It sounds like you're just telling us your problem.  Are you asking for help?

Morph targets are generally preferred for animating mouth movements, but especially for lip syncing in anim8or.  Other programs have different forms of morph targets or something of the sort, but from what I've seen, bones usually aren't preferred for animating mouths.
Bones are normally preferred for skeletal type movement, or normal movement upon a hinge.  The jaw does move on a hinge, but there is lip movement as well which makes things much trickier and not preferred with bones.  Therefore you use morph targets.  So when animating things such as a mouth, a piston, or even something like a flag you may want to use morph targets.  When animating things such as a hinge, or a character bones would be preferred.  You can get smooth transitions with bones as well, such as a rope, though you use many bones in a line normally to give more freedom.
I hope that helps you a bit

You must have missed something when trying to create shadows.  Either your objects aren't casting/receiving shadows, or your lights aren't creating shadows.
Here's a tut I made on rendering that could prove useful.

Ah, I understand now.  I'm referring to envelope weights as what you're referring to as influence volumes; i'm also referring to painted weights as what you're referring to as skinning weights.  I don't want to come off as any type of smart alek, but I feel I should correct your terminology.  Envelop weights are the ones that form a sort of "envelope" over the mesh where you can set the inner and outer influences.  Painted weights is where you paint the geometry telling what bones to influence what.

As for what's better:  Normally I tend to use painted weights.  This is mainly because I feel I have much more control over the mesh this way, and envelope weights can be very difficult to form around a mesh sometimes.  Still, painted weights can get confusing, and envelope weights are a bit easier to use.  When using painted weights it can be difficult to paint exactly what you want when sometimes you'll accidentally paint something behind.
For a hand, I'd typically use painted weights, though others may use envelope weights.  Really I feel it's more of an opinion on what works better, though sometimes envelop weights wont work.  An example would be if you wanted a bone to influence the mouth of a character.  An envelope would be very difficult to form perfectly around the jaw, while you could easily paint what you wanted to be affected.

Those are only my views on it, I'm not sure what other people feel. 

Kreator:  I'm not exactly sure what you mean by staying on the ground, do you mean in things such as walk cycles?  I'm not exactly sure what I'll use for video capture.  Is camtasia a good program for it?  I plan on having narration, as I don't like time-lapse videos as much either.  I may post them on youtube, but I'll be sure to offer higher resolution videos as well, as I hate youtube's quality.  You can't see a thing.

RnDr FOX:  The video format would probably be something that's more or less universally acceptable, such as a format and codec that's readable by "Windows Media Player" or perhaps useable with quicktime, as I know it's a format many in the 3d industry use.  Mainly it's used because you can go frame-by-frame, and it's nice high quality.  I'll add animals to my list as well.  I already have modeling techniques written down, they will probably include:  Box modeling, Poly-by-poly modeling, and edge extrude methods.  I'll probably also include the facts and knowledge that these can be and are usually all combined to make the most efficient form of modeling.
Hm, for some reason the glow never seems to work on my computer... I just get highlighted text... unless that's what it's supposed to be.

Another thing you want to take into account when creating a room is the direction of the 'normals'.  Basically the direction of the faces.  You can create double sided materials, but normally, if you were to make a room that you wanted to render from the inside, you'd want the faces turned inwards.  To do this in combination with Nate Bro's short tutorial, you would drag select all the faces and go "edit>flip normals" or press "shift+n"
To be able to tell the direction the normals are facing, you can figure out by selecting a face.  When the face is yellow you are looking at the front of it, when it's blue, you're looking at the back, simple as that.  Normally you want the front facing you, though as I said before, you can create double sided materials.

You're going to want to use morph targets as Kreator suggested, in combination with Phonemes.  Phonemes are basically the smallest sound type you can make.  For different sounds, there is a different mouth shape.  Here's a great example of phonemes you can use as a reference:

Good luck!