Textures are not really needed, and add to the render time, you can use simple grey colors. Did you read my reply above, there's a link to 3dwin that will allow you to convert it into an obj format. This will work better, but the file size is bigger so I couldn't format them this way. OBJ is probably a better format anyway. YOu can just slect a bunch of files to convert to obj, but be warned these files will be much larger than the 3ds form.