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KiloWatt Animation for XNA

Jwatte has tweeted news prediction of a new version of his KiloWatt animation library and Pre-release bits are here.

"This is the third-and-a-half release of the KiloWatt Animation library. It is intended as a companion to the kW X-port 3ds Max X file exporter, to be used with Microsoft XNA Game Studio. This release is for version 3.0/3.1 for Windows and Xbox 360. Sorry, no Zune support "

He goes on to explain how this is different to the XNA Skinning sample on the creators website

The KiloWatt Animation Library is different from the XNA Skinning sample code in several ways, including:

• KiloWatt Animation stores animation keyframes as position, rotation and scale (for a total of 10 floats), instead of the full matrix used by the Animation Components.
• KiloWatt Animation removes unnecessary keyframes (down to a tolerance that you can specify), for a usually quite significant savings in file size.
• KiloWatt Animation does interpolation between animation keyframes using quaternions, which means that slow-motion and varispeed playback will still look smooth.
• KiloWatt Animation supports composition (blending) of animations to generate the final output pose for a given Model.
• KiloWatt Animation replaces the Effect used for your Model only when you tell it to.
• KiloWatt Animation does not make any specific demands of your geometry; you can (and should) use it to animate rigid objects such as windmills, catapults etc. in addition to skinned meshes.