Animating 3D Graphics - Marmalade SDK Mobile Game Development Essentials - page 142

Here are the steps you should follow to export an animated model from Blender:
1. Load the animation you wish to export into Blender and then go to File |
Export | Marmalade Cross-platform Apps (.group) to display the export
options screen. As a reminder, the export options are shown in the previous
screenshot, but please refer to the steps listed in Chapter 4 , 3D Graphics
Rendering , for more information about the standard model export settings.
2. To tell the exporter to write out all the different animation file types, ensure
that the Export Armatures checkbox is selected.
3. The Animations Frames combobox contains three options. None will
export no animation data, Keyframes Only will export just the data for the
key frames of the animation (this is the option you would normally want
to select), and Full Animation will export data for every frame regardless
of whether it is a key frame or not (this is often referred to as "baking" the
animation and means you get the exact animation seen in the modeling
package at the expense of an increase in animation memory footprint).
4. The Animations Actions combobox contains two settings. Default
Animation will export only the animation that has been selected as the
default for the armature. The other option is All Animations , which will
export all the animations currently defined for the armature.
5. The final setting is the Animation FPS value. This dictates the playback
speed in frames per second for the animation, so it is possible to speed up or
slow down an animation by changing this value without the need to alter all
the key frame timings.
6. To export the data, ensure that you have a file location and name entered
in the boxes at the top of the screen and then click on the Export
Marmalade button.
The Marmalade 3D animation file formats
We can now export the animation data from the 3D modeling package of our choice,
but before we actually make use of them, let's take a quick look at the new file types
that we've just generated.
The SKEL file
A SKEL file contains all the information pertaining to the skeleton of our animation.
The file first defines an instance of a CIwAnimSkel class, which is a wrapper for a
number of CIwAnimBone instances.