Got it!

After putting quite a few hours in today I think I've cracked the technique of creating a 3DsMax mesh, a Photoshop texture and combining them to make a whole object in Unreal Editor, to a decent standard.

I've created my poker chip mesh and all the coloured textures i need. I tried photographing real chips but the level of detail was far too poor, so I copied the design and created them in Photoshop instead. Here's a couple of piles of chips. The white stack is the size I'm going to use for a 1-jump-high platform:



One problem I did find was that exporting from Photoshop to DDS file, for some reason, lead to several patches of black pixels being placed in very inconvenient places! Fortunatly, as far as I am aware, and that my test runs have shown, Unreal Editor can import BMPs as UVW template textures as well. So that's what I've done. Here's a little example of the PSD looking nice, and the exported DDS, not:



Another issue I've noticed today is that just in the little test room I've made there are no less than 1200 polygons. So unless my level is less than 80 times larger than this tiny space, I'll need to reduce the number of polygona in my poker chip stacks. (my upper limit is 100,000 poly's)