I pretty much followed the Guitar Matey Tutorial. Thoughtfully submitted by Dan Waters(thanks to ye). I know that my project can animate skinned meshes from XSI because I was able to use his Pirate in my project and successfully animate it-- But when I follow his instructions from the video from rigging/weightpainting/animating I don't get an animation in XNA though I can see it as clear as day in XSI and I can even see the animation name in the XSI viewer(though it will not play).

In addition to this, I am curious to know if we are required to use bones or if we can just use nulls as described by the xsi xna documentation. Either way, I have done both and neither show animation when I store them as character key sets and save the animations in the mixer.

Here is my cylinder.

-EDIT

Nevermind, I figured out my problem. It was that I wasn't using a specific shader given by xsi.
So in addition to the tutorial by Dan Waters make sure you stick to the specific shader he uses and that you freeze all tranforms and modeling information on your bones and mesh before you start enveloping.