Well, what you are asking is how to develop a proper art pipeline, which takes awhile to establish. A smooth pipeline will allow you to create the asset see it in the engine than release it for usage in the app. But you probably don't have programmers dedicated to developing plugins for you, so it will be a bit more cumbersome for you.
Create your asset -> export to a supported file format (.3ds, Collada, etc) -> hand off to programmer -> load in app -> you as the artist view it and give approval -> tweak anything if needed -> programmer stores file as binary for usage in the game.
Thats about the most basic pipeline.
If you go with collada you can load in the .DAE for the mesh and rig, and load separate .DAE files for each animations (or you can embed the animations in the main file if you wish). You then just trigger the current animation for the rig.
See the TestCollada file for an example with a single walking animation.
Another question, how do you get the textures to be changed inside the game during game play, is it a case of having a seperate 3d animated object or is the case of being calling another texture and putting it on a pre loaded object.
Cheers.