Irrlicht Engine

I'm trying to bash together a basic application that can load in a rigged mesh (from blender) and manually control it using the GUI functions.

From reading previous posts, I think I've got something which *should* work, but doesn't: this is more than likely my illiteracy of Irrlicht programming and probably something simple.

So, just to cover the basics to begin with:
1). What is the best format for exporting rigged meshes from Blender 2.78 into Irrlicht: is it still .b3d or has collada rigged mesh support got anywhere?
2). When importing a .b3d file, I get 16 objects: ROOT + 15 actual objects which make up the mesh. I don't get the named bones: is this normal?
3). My application is modelling a robot arm: whereby I want to rotate one of 6 points (in a single axis only), each parented from each other. In Blender, this is quite straight forward: I simply go into pose mode on the specific bone and rotate. However, for doing this in Irrlicht, would I need to update the bone positions in relation to each other as well, or will then retain their anchor points (like bones do)?
4). Ultimately, I'm at the stage where I'm loading either .X or .b3d files into the GUI, setting a rotation, but no rotation is occurring: just remains static. The model is set to EJOR_CONTROL and I'm calling AnimateBones() on each cycle: is there anything else needed?

Any ideas?

Mat

1.) B3D is probably the best. Collada loader still does not support animation.
2.) Hm, maybe compare output with loading ninja.b3d in the Irrlicht media. That one uses bone-based animation to my knowledge. I'm not that deep into the format that I know how the output should look like.
3.) Sorry, don't know. Would have to try myself.
4.) Sorry, also no help there as I never worked with manual animation. Could be you have to call OnAnimate or the ISceneManager::drawAll (which calls OnAnimate) as well.

I found this vid about skinned meshes in OpenGL, and found that they document somewhat well how to load the animation from a COLLADA file, i hope it is useful
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0jb1OBw45I

DirectX .X files aren't for directX alone so they do as well for a good skinned model export. Try to find a DirectX exporter that works properly in Blender