Getting Started With XNA - Animating a 3D Model

In the previous tutorial, we’ve loaded and displayed a 3d model. But can you think of a game with static 3d models? No, it’s time we start animating our model. Most of the time, a 3d artist will handle the animations, and you’ll just load it and play it. But animations aren’t supported out of the box in XNA. There is a demo on creators club which allows you to load skinned animations, and there is a project on codeplex, called the XNA Animation Component Library, which allows you to load skinned and unskinned animations, with multiple meshes, and so on. But in this tutorial, we’ll animate our model from code. We’ll do a tutorial on the XNA Animation Component Library later.