Things we've learned (the hard way)

The deadline (3rd of August) is approaching a bit too fast for our liking. We have to admit that we thought this would be easier than it turned out to be. For other people looking into doing XNA stuff we have learned a few things with regards to the loading (and animation) of 3D objects, so here is a short list of the things we've learned so far:

• When using Maya, all joints of a skeleton/rig needs to have a root node/joint
• Weights seem to work fine
• Constraints are a little iffy, but a possible workaround is to skin multiple objects to the same node/joint. This works, even though we get a warning when exporting :)
• Every time you add such a 3D file to the project, set the content loader to "Skinnedmodel"
• When exporting, choose "Bake complex animation"
• Remember to take a peek at the filesize of the .FBX-files once in a while :)

That was that for this post - we hope this is useful for other people than ourselves. We might be back with some more posts as the crunchtime approaches.

Signed,
Svok & Am