Tutorial: How to get XNA's SkinnedSample working with MonoGame

There’s a few things you need to make sure of before you import into your game:

  1. When you export, your armature must be in its resting pose in Blender (T-Pose). Aka, no rotation/scale/position can be applied to any bones. What I do is I create a 1 keyframe long animation called initial, and switch to it before exporting.

  2. Every face needs to have a weight applied to it. Non-weighted faces will distort the animation much like you’re seeing here. A really good way to make sure you have this is when you parent your armature, you select “Use Automatic Weights” when it asks you.

  3. I’m not sure about this one, but combining meshes into one tends to fix it if certain parts of the model aren’t visible.

  4. Use the latest version of Blender. I’m not sure how helpful this would be, but my (very similar to yours) problems stopped after I upgraded and did the above steps.


After trialing SkinnedSample for a while now, it seems to me that it’s a bit basic in certain areas (no animation blending or modification of playback speed, plus it does not smoothly animate between keyframes, resulting in jittery animation).

If I manage to get BetterSkinned running, I’ll post my findings here.

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