[dashals]

Hi Guys,
I'm writing my first OpenGL ES application for the iPhone.

So far I have managed to render an number of different, shapes, with textures, lighting and a few blend effects, so now I need to think about rendering actual models and animated models...

Is there any particular way that is designed/works the most efficiently for loading and rendering models from an external file format?

At the moment I'm planning on parsing a .Obj file from Blender 3D and loading vertex, material, and normals co-ordinates into an array to render. Not yet sure how I'm going to load animate these yet...

Is this the most efficient model format to use?

Is this the most efficient way to render a model for the iPhone?

Finally can someone point me in the right directions for animating a model in opengl based on animation data from something like blender?

Thanks in advance.

[Heiko Behrens]

Hey dashals,

I am sure you will find plenty of information about efficient rendering on the iPhone. Addressing your loading issue: There might be an alternative with obj2opengl. It's a script that converts wavefront obj files (nearly any 3d modeler can export this) to C/C++ arrays that can be used by OpenGL ES directly, that is: You simply refer to the created arrays as you will be taught in any tutorial where you define your first cube by hand.

Regards,
Heiko