Your animation is definitely there (look in the tube.xsi file and you will see all the different SI_FCurve there with meaningful values, at least from what you describe). However, you haven't used an FX file that implements skinning, therefore your model will display with the default pose since the basic material in XNA doesn't support skinning.

Thank you! Finally got everything working. I had checked the basic phong shader for the skinning info and had seen that it supported it, where I went wrong was thinking that the default material was the same as the phong fx file.

Took some trial and error to make a custom rig and see how everything would translate into XNA, but I'm actually very pleased with the results so far. Thanks again.

Great! Now maybe you can build a blog or something about your experience to share with others. I know that doesn't exclude us from producing tutorial content :-), but it's would certainly bring value to the XNA/Modtool community.

Alexandre Jean Claude:

You are animating the effector of an IK chain and storing its animation in an action.

<snip>

Practically, what that means is that the safest way to store animation clips is to use the Store->Local Transformation - Animation or current values.

I'm having trouble with storing animation as well, my main problem is that I can't get the constraints I have on the feet to store. I rigged my model with the two end effectors at the ankles parented to two nulls that were children of the globalSRT null (I also tried this and had success using a pose constraint). This way, when the waist controller moves down the feet stay planted on the floor. The feet bones were then made children of the nulls and I could just use the two nulls to controll the feet and legs. This exports fine when animated as the default animations, but I have yet to come accross a way to store it through XSI's store functions.

Since I can load my animation in XNA and have everything translate properly, I'm assuming that the lack of constraints is a limit of XSI's store function, rather than it's ability to export them correctly to XNA (by constraints I mean the effect of the constraint, as I'm aware it's all turned into nulls anyway).

I noticed that the elastic_guy.xsi file is not rigged with any type of foot controller to keep his feet planted and make use of that IK chain. Is this because those types of constraints won't store?

Any ideas on the best way around this?

I followed these exact steps and applied Phong.fx to the cylinder and I still don't see any animations in the viewer :(

Are these steps accurate or did I miss something?

Here is a streaming WMV of me trying to do the steps outlined on the last page:
http://www.catapultic.com/Help_BendCylinder.wmv

Here is a link to the zip of the generated files
http://www.catapultic.com/BendCylinder.zip

Hopefully you guys can clear up my errors a bit :) Thanks!

I reinstalled mod tool and the sample worked :)