I am not sure about how to load custom animations using the AvatarWrapper but if you are following the instructions on how to export using the avatar rig the resulting FBX is designed to be using the the custom avatar animation processor found here http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/customavataranimation. If you take a look at the processor you ...

As part of the stencil shadow process the model is extruded in the direction of the light. If your model is open it will cause “holes” areas that should be in shadow but are not. Another step is to process your shadow caster model and add a quad for every edge in the model. If I remember right there is a stencil shadow sample in the DX SDK and it ...

The error is most likely being caused by an invalid non decomposable transformation matrix in the list of bones being passed to the AvatarRenderer.Draw call. Each matrix in the list of bones passed to the draw call must be able to be decomposed. To test this try the following: ·         Wrap the AvatarRenderer.Draw call in a try catch ...

You might be able to manually view the constraints on the animation rigs we provide.

You can use inverse kinematics to determine the location for the rest of the bones when you know where you want the hand position. Don't know if there are any XNA specific IK tutorials out there.

Not sure if you are still having issues. But from the looks of your code you are expecting the distance function to return a float3 when it only returns a float for the distance. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb509592(VS.85).aspx

Since you will mostly be looking down at the terrain and only over a small portion of the total terrain I would go with a simple chunked method. Take a height map say 512x512 and create a bunch of smaller terrain squares maybe 10 x 10 (test this out you will hit a sweet spot). Before drawing the squares you can determine if the bounds are inside ...

There are many tradeoffs when designing many systems for games. There is no perfect solution for terrain. It would be helpful to know what type of game you are building. What are the requirements on the terrain? You mentioned texture spatting. What are your other goals? What size are you thinking about?

I would suggest the Softimage Mod Tool 7.5. It is free for premium creators. The download link can be found here http://creators.xna.com/en-US/partners.

Right click the FBX file in your content project and make sure the content processor is set to the custom avatar processor. The error message is telling you that your content was build using the model processor and your code is asking for something else.