I don’t know if anyone has made a single tutorial yet for exporting with Blender/Chicken. I have seen individual tutorials for certain effects, for example Thomas did one for how to make normal maps using Blender.
I’m curious, you said you know how to model but from what I have read it sounds like you have just started using Blender. If you are more comfortable using another 3d program, you might look to see how to get models from it into Blender, and then work from there. Obviously, you won’t be able to get everything into Blender (unless your 3d app and Blender has really good Collada support), but you can at least model in something you feel comfortable with and transfer it to Blender.
That’s what I am doing with my models. I model and build my UV maps in Lightwave, because I am most familiar with its tools. I then load the static mesh into Blender and create weight maps for bones and animate it there.
As for best practices… Well, I wouldn’t know what those would be. But almost every realtime game engine requires UV mapping for textures to work properly. Some exporters can convert built-in native mappings into UV coordinates automatically. (Some of the Lightwave exporters I’ve used work this way, mapping planar, cubic, cylindrical, etc. into UV coordinates upon export.) Chicken will not do this, so you must use UV mapping.
I recommend checking out the help file that is included with Chicken. It explains what is supported. For example, you can either use materials or just assign a UV image to your model – Either one will be picked up by the exporter and a Panda-style material created in the Egg file.
