Skeletal Animation with XNA

My Bad
Well, I am still working on skeletal animation. I was able to find out that skeletal animation is supported in the .x and .fbx model file formats. However, it is not directly supported by either the DirectX or XNA API's. But there is a demo application that shows you the code necessary to load an animated model file containing bones and keyframed animations (the keyframes are only manipulating the bones, in a skeletal animation file).

So, what do you know I bought a book:















update: there is a newer version of the book out for XNA 3.0. I haven't picked it up yet to see whats new or changed but you may want to start with that if your interested in skeletal animation in XNA.















Thought it might be a little helpful to unravelling the mysteries of skeletal animation in XNA. So far it has been pretty much just a straight forward rip off of the demos from the XNA community site. With perhaps a small smidgen of useful detail on how the code works and what things you need to do to get it working.

Bloating
The book uses three separate projects although for a Microsoft developer whats another project. To an indie, it's a lot of overhead you don't need especially if you are only going to have two or three classes in each project. Another set of endlessly nested project configuration settings and adding project references. Although, bringing them in under a single solution could work to mitigate the risk of wasting too much time hopping between instances of Visual Studios and making sure your using the latest compiled version of the libraries.

But I am guessing once I have it all working I won't have to touch it again for a long while. Provided there are no problems loading the exported model files.