i think i have to disagree with you anasasis...
i think that would be a really expensive way of doing things in a game, although, i dont actually know the ability of the consoles these days....and what they can handle, so you could be right
maybe it was made from lots of little polys and then something like the transfer-maps or ultimapper (dunno the max equivalent is) was used to get the transparency maps.

i also think doing it that way is rather time consuming unless they had a script to do it for them

again i dont really know what constraints they were working in.