by Jojon » Fri May 01, 2009 3:40 am
Most of the geometry looks angular and workable enough, although some of the rounded bits may have room for some simplification. We haven't got plasma's normal maps figured out yet, but if there are no moving lights, a combination of carefully oriented mapping, vertex paint and lightmaps should be able to produce similar results -- if you are extremely picky with the lighting on the rough surfaces, though, you may want to wait for the normalmaps, since you wouldn't want to bake a huge, highly detailed texture for each individual surface.. .:7
I'm not sure how well large complex non-convex objects take environment maps, since they are projected from the object centre, but it may ("may", I say) prove best to make a simple gold-ish cubemap for the reflections on the metal bits. (again, depending on how much accuracy you are willing to sacrifice (a dynamic reflection cube is still inaccurate, of course))
Still unwilling to give Blender a go and try out an export, while waiting for the "official" tools? :7