Zangetsu Oe

Hello, Please excuse my noobishness, as I am just getting into animations, but I'm not sure where to turn to for help. I think my problem is that I just don't know the right questions to ask or the right keywords to put into Google search. Let me explain what my project is as best I can. I've been making transforming robot avatars for some time now, Up until now they have all had two modes, a bipedal humanoid robot mode and a vehicle mode, When in robot mode I don't use any animations at all, All the robot parts are just attached to their appropriate bones\attachment points. When the transformation is activated, scripts play an SL animation that folds the avatar up into a locked pose, and all the mechanical parts move to form the vehicle. This works pretty well and I've done several avatars with this technique now. Feeling pretty confident with the modelling and scripting side of things, I'm attempting to do something more challenging. My Current project is a bipedal robot that transforms into a wolf. I've got all my meshes done for this, and now I am moving on to doing animations. The idea is that with no SL animations playing the avatar will be standing around like a normal humanoid. I want to create an animation that will take the basic skeleton (I don't need or want bento bones for this) and put the avatar into a quadruped pose. Imagine bending over and placing your hands on the ground. If I just take a basic humanoid shape and adjust the angles of the joints, I can't really get the body into the shape I want. Specifically there are some distances between joints that I think need to change (if my thinking on this is wrong please set me straight.) In this case, when the animation is playing I want the distance between the knee and the ankle to be ~%70 of the what distance between those two joints is when the animation is not playing. Similarly, The overall distance from the shoulders to the hips needs to increase to %150 the length. Basically imagine that the lower legs get shorter and the spine gets longer when the animation is playing and revert to the lengths set by the SL body shape when the animation stops. One of my goals is that the avatar can use any normal humaniod animations when not in wolf mode like dances or furniture poses/animations. I've been doing some trial and error with Avastar in Blender, but frankly I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the options and jargon in Avastar. I would absolutely love it if a kind person was willing to do some hand holding to teach me what I am missing, (if you're willing to go that far I'm willing to compensate you cause I know that's a big ask.) However I don't expect to get that level of assistance, so I'll happily take whatever advice I can get, even if its just cluing me in to what this kind of thing is called, so that I can figure out and find what documentation or tutorials I should be reading. Thanks kindly in advance.