Optimized for all devices

We've been working with 3D graphics and animation on mobile devices for longer than anyone else in the industry. That's why our company used to be called Ideaworks3D.

For the best possible 3D experience across mobile devices today, you need a pipeline that not only exploits all the power of high-end tablets, but can also excel on the lower-end smartphones. Only Marmalade delivers a 3D pipeline that provides optimal performance across all these devices.

Best-practice asset pipeline

All 3D models, animations, skins, skeletons and scene data are exported from modeling tools – like Autodesk 3D Studio Max and Maya – in readable text file formats. These are later converted to optimized binary files for reading on the target device. The text file export contains the maximum amount of information, so programmers can filter out data they don’t need when building their binary version, but won’t have to go back to the artist if they decide it’s useful later.

Powerful exporters and viewers

Marmalade provides plug-ins for all recent versions of Autodesk 3DS Max and Maya, allowing all 3D data to be easily exported from the artist's chosen tools. Models and animations can also be previewed in an integrated Marmalade runtime directly from the modeling tools. That way, the artist can see exactly what their assets will look like in OpenGL ES 1.x, OpenGL ES 2.0 or software rendering, without ever leaving the modeling tool.

Automatic asset optimization for different device classes

Marmalade has been working with all the mobile chipset providers – including Imagination Technologies, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, ARM and Broadcom – for many years, so we know their architectures very well.

By default, Marmalade will build a binary asset set that runs on any device, but we also make it easy to create additional asset sets optimized for different device classes. An asset set optimized for iPhone, for example, will make sure the binary version of a 3D model stores index streams as 'strip ordered lists': the optimal way of presenting data to the iPhone OpenGL ES 1.x drivers.