[badsectoracula]

While in general you are right about the boring stuff (although some people find writing tools far from boring - e.g. me, i should actually write less tools if ever want to finish some of my own stuff:-P) the shiny visual bits aren't usually "just" imported. In the (commercial, not personal) engines i worked at, the artists used their 3D mesh editor of choice (max and maya) to make the meshes but only bothered with the basic texturing in that 3D mesh editor. The materials were created inside the engine's own editor since 3dsmax/maya's materials both do not make much sense to fully replicate and they lack functionality that the engine's own renderer (and material system) can provide.

In the last (commercial) engine i worked at, the pipeline was to export the mesh from the 3D mesh editor (3dsmax or maya) to a custom easy to parse format and then import it from the editor to a more compact faster and easier to work with format. Then the artists would create the materials and other resources that the engine needed to work with from inside the engine's own tools. The imported resource remembered the original file so that artists could simply export again and ask the editor to reimport stuff (at a later point we made the editor to automatically monitor the directories for changes - both Windows and Linux provide functionality for this - so the artists would simply export from their 3D mesh editor and the engine's editor would reimport the meshes automatically).

In the previous (commercial) engine i worked at, things were simpler in that we only supported 3ds max (although the 3dsmax SDK was far from simple, if it wasn't for SymbianOS it would be one of the worst SDKs i've worked with... but that is another story) and we exported animations and meshes directly to a custom format the engine expected. The exporter also had a "preview" feature to allow the artists preview the exported files in a standalone viewer that used the engine's renderer to make sure that things looked fine (in that case we actually did try to use 3ds max's materials, although in hindsight that was a mistake since even with the viewer the artists often assigned textures incorrectly - we should have relied only as little as necessary on 3ds max instead of making it the primary content editor).