i told one of my subordinates to build some wall, floor, ceiling models using high res textures, high poly count, normal maps and whatever he can come up with. is there a format jme can import which supports all the funky stuff like multutexturing and normal maps or do i have to import the model and manage it myself?
Probably your best bet is Collada.
I am not sure if jME's front-end to collada supports it though. Effects like normal maps and spec maps require shaders which are quite complicated to implement in a multi-purpose model importer.