   XNA Skinned Animation Sample, Vertex Declaration?
  Hiya.I'm trying to integrate the XNA Skinned Animation Sample (here: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/sample/skinnedmodel) into my own code....of course it doesn't work and I'm trying to figure out why.Searching through the original code I realize that there is never any custom vertex declaration, but the vertex shader is looking for data in the following format:// Vertex shader input structure.struct VS_INPUT{    float4 Position : POSITION0;    float3 Normal : NORMAL0;    float2 TexCoord : TEXCOORD0;    float4 BoneIndices : BLENDINDICES0;    float4 BoneWeights : BLENDWEIGHT0;};Forgive my dumbness...how the heck does the sample work without declaring or using any vertex format?  THANKS   
  I'm not familiar with that sample, but I'm guessing that it figures out the appropriate declaration in the model processor based on the imported vertex stream.   ;I'd venture the same guess as Matt, but if it works that way it happens down in the default model processor. At least I can't seem to find any specialized code in the SkinnedModelProcessor dealing with blend indices and weights. I guess the default model processor just keeps a generic map of interesting vertex properties around so it knows what info to keep and how to map this to the declaration. I'm afraid I'm not too familiar with the internals of the content pipeline beyond that, but it looks like you can try to cast your NodeContent to a MeshContent and then inspect MeshContent.Geometry[].Vertices.Channels to inspect the available vertex properties from within the pipeline. Presumably changes to these channels will reflect in the vertex data being made available in the compiled model and the vertex declaration that goes with it.