   Blender Skeletal Model Loaded in XNA -- Bones wont  move
  Following these two tutorials somewhat in parallel:http://www.stromcode.com/2008/03/13/modeling-for-xna-with-blender-iii/http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Animation/BSoD/Character_Animation/Upper_body_weight_paintingI am able to get a model with a skeletal structure in Blender.  If I move particular bones the vertices move with it, excellent.Exports to FBX just fine.The Content Pipeline imports the FBX just fine.  Using a debugger I can see the bone structure loads as well.  As well as each mesh (each eye of the basic model has a mesh then the entire body is one mesh).So now I am at wits end.  I have tried every possible thing I can to mess with the .Transform property of each bone just to see if I can make anything happen.  Nothing ever happens.  I can either rotate the entire model or the different meshes but I cannot make a bone move/rotate and actually see any changes.None of the above tutorials actually list any XNA code.  Does anyone have a sample snippet of rendering code or a page that shows a good example of how to manipulate the bone structure of the model at runtime and actually cause the changes.  Google isn't lending me a helping hand on this one.Thanks in advance.   
  Additional Questions:Does XNA even load the weighted vertices?Do I NEED to use animations to move these things around?  I just want a free moving model that I can work my own physics magic on.  So I should not need to be stuck to animations to make it move.   ;Have you already tried loading your mesh in the skinning sample? It's a decent testbed for animated meshes and a good place to get started with adding transforms on your own. For my tinkering I changed the method AnimationPlayer.UpdateWorldTransforms to this:[source lang=csharp]   // arrays to hold custom transforms, size is skinningData.BindPose.CountMatrix[] externalTransforms;Matrix[] overrideWorldTransforms;bool useOverride = false;public void UpdateWorldTransforms(TimeSpan time, Matrix rootTransform){    // Root bone.    worldTransforms[0] = useOverride ? overrideWorldTransforms[0] : (boneTransforms[0] * rootTransform);    // Child bones.    for (int bone = 1; bone < worldTransforms.Length; bone++)    {   if (useOverride)   {  worldTransforms[bone] = overrideWorldTransforms[bone];   }   else   {  int parentBone = skinningDataValue.SkeletonHierarchy[bone];  worldTransforms[bone] = externalTransforms[bone] * boneTransforms[bone] * worldTransforms[parentBone];   }    }}This allows me to either override the bone transforms completely with the ones I set in overrideWorldTransforms[], or manipulate the bindposition by setting externalTransforms[] to anything other than Matrix.Identity. The former should be useful for your physics code, while the latter has some use to tweak the model.Quote:Does XNA even load the weighted vertices?I'm not sure if this holds for the most recent versions of XNA, but as I recall the XNA content pipeline does not load the vertex weights by default. Instead, you need to use a custom content importer/process. Fortunately this is included in the skinning sample(!)Quote:Do I NEED to use animations to move these things around?You don't need to use animations, but if you need skinning (so bones & vertex weights) the animation sample probably is your best starting point. Having the option to animate can come in handy later and you can just turn it off when you're altering the transforms manually. If you don't need skinning, then maybe this sample might be of use.;  http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/skinnedmodelThis seems like a good place, as suggested by Remigius.  I will flip through it and take a peek.Another issue is how many places I could be going wrong.  From creating the bone structure in Blender, the export to FBX process, the importing to XNA using the Content Pipeline and then of course the code.  Perhaps someone has a very simple 3D model they have rigged and worked with before so  help cut back on the fail points for me.Thanks.   