How to import Blender 3D animation to iPhone OpenGL ES?

Question

I am trying to do animations on iPhone using OpenGL ES. I am able to do the animation in Blender 3D software. I can export as a .obj file from Blender to OpenGL and it works on

Answer 1

I haven't used recent versions of Blender, but my understanding is that it supports exporting mesh animation as a sequence of .obj files. If you can already display a single .obj in your app, then displaying several of them one after another will achieve what you want.

Now, note that this is not the most efficient form to export this type of animation, since each .obj file will have a lot of duplicated info. If your mesh stays fixed over time (i.e. only the vertices move with the polygon structure, uv coords, etc. all fixed) then you can just import the entire first .obj and from the rest just read the vertex array.

If you wanted to optimize this even more, you could compress the vertex arrays so that you only store the differences from the previous frame of the animation.

Edit: I see that Blender 2.59 has export to COLLADA. According to the Blender manual, you can export object transformations, and you can also export baked animation for rigged objects. The benefit for you in supporting the COLLADA format in your iPhone app is that you are free to switch between animation tools, since most of them export this format.