What is the end intention? Is this to be in a game, as a looping ambient animation for a prop asset? Assuming this is the intention, I would suggest pre-baking the animation into bones, and using skinning to animate the meshes. This is highly performant, but not interactive. To do this you could create the initial mesh…
Highpoly base in Blender, sculpted in ZBrush, retopologized and unwrapped in Blender, normals in xNormal, AO in Blender. Rendered in Blender's Game Engine. More images here: [link]
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