Hello all,

Could you guys please give some detailed steps needed to create a very basic animating model, which works in XNA?

In one thread on this forum it was written what you need to do to get animated models created in Softimage to play in XNA:
Apparently animations will not play in XNA unless you have textures and a shader applied to your model. I was testing with the simplest of models to prove animation worked so did not bother to texture the model - hence it did not work. Once I added a texture/shader it worked.

I think my problem is either applying the texture/shader or my animation is done wrong. I am trying to make a very simple model that has a rotating animation. I managed to add an “Action” to the X4N_AnimationManager and the animation plays in Softimage, but not in XNA. Everything in XNA is OK, since I’m able to play the animations on the example Robot that comes with Softimage. Although I’m not sure that I’m creating the KeyableParams correctly. I also think I managed to add a shader in the “Material Manager” since I can see my model in the camera viewport with DirectX9 mode. I used the “Lambert.fx”, which comes with Softimage’s example files.

PS: I’m using XNA 3, VC# 2008 Express and SoftImage 7.5 Mod Tool. My graphics card supports only DX9 and shader 1.1 or 1.0.

It won’t matter whether or not you actually are using textures, however, the animation of a skinned model is done using shaders in XNA.

Digital Tutors has a great tutorial on this called “Shader Pipeline in XSI and XNA” or something like that. They explain how it’s done, step by step.

-Daniel

I think I read somewhere that the exported mesh must have a Phong shader for XNA to recognize it.