How can I load and play animated meshes in XNA? I have seen the skinned mesh sample at the creator's club, but it only uses FBX meshes? I want to be able to use X meshes that have been exported from truespace.

I have the same question, I used the codeplex animation component library and tried to compile the dwarf sample but it seems it doesn't work with xna 2

XNA Animation Component Library

here's the sample
making dwarf walk and run

Yeah, I think the animation component on codeplex is rather old and outdated. I actually got a X file with animation running with the skinned mesh sample on creator's club. But it seems to mess up the model rather badly. It looks like some kind of snake or something. Pretty nasty polygon soup. :(

I have also looked into the collada loader in Dungeon Quest (http://benjaminnitschke.no-ip.info/), but it's so tightly integrated into the game. It will take some time to extract it into a seperate lib.

I have started looking into Blender now, but it really isn't our artists first choice. He is used to truespace and won't be as productive with blender. I found a nice article about creating content for XNA with blender though: http://www.stromcode.com/2008/03/10/modelling-for-xna-with-blender-part-i/

I can't believe it is this hard to export content from a 3D package into XNA. It's always animation that seems to be the problem. Static geometry is easy to export.