The basic difference between the traditional Cinema / Animation and Game is in cinema and animation, you keep doing different things after short intervals and keep moving to the new scenes and rarely you repeat. It's kind of LINEAR thing.

In games, your work revolves around few things and characters, but more and more people do the same thing. Each gamer approach the same game differently in a NON-LINEAR manner ( though a map is usually defined for the game progression. This will also go away after sometime.) but live within the same world for long ( many years). Since the assets have long shelf value and bigger revenue possibilities, people spend a lot of time and energy developing these assets. The casual animators can not spend that kind of time and energy.

In cinema, everything is DUMB and the director is the only INTELLIGENT entity. In a game, every entity is SMART and the PLAYER ( DUMB ) IS BEING PLAYED by these intelligent entities.

So the basic approach got to be different though every passing day the games are aspiring to be more cinematic.

An interesting article (although very brief) about this very thing.. Using game engines to create movies...

In the explorer, the assets show as Prefab format. Any idea how you convert them to any standard pipeline format(s)?

prefab is a file container, if you expand and will find model and animation in fbx format, you can store it with RMB "open in browser" Now drag the fbx files to 3Dxchange. (motion directly in the motionLibary ). 3dxchange is very efficent, you can select all and drop it in the Motion Libary .
Now add all to the perform editor and save all at once as iMotion directly for iClone, also The most modells have a max or maya template, so mostly not many work with this if you only want extract the motions

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liebe Grüße vidi

meet us here

Thanks. Now I can see some light.

To expand these "prefabs", do we need any particular software ?
The assets in prefab format look so tiny ! In just few KB's !!

a prefab is not the modell , but it can have a modell motion and more .
If you see an arrow symbol you can expand this and see what all is in this prefab. If not it is not in it what you can store or need .

Actually you should looking for the modells and motion in fbx format.

Also texture files
Normaly you can see it in the asset browser. then open it with use RMB open in Browser Option.

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liebe Grüße vidi

meet us here

Thank you Vidi. I got it.