well, importing a format and referencing it as external geometry are two different things... :) It may be to their advantage to have a proprietary format that is tweaked to the program. I just hope they have utilities for working with the files. I think we are in agreement on this though... thats why I use a converter that doesn't mangle the texture information. (though I rarely make anything in 3ds format, as I do my modelling in Carrara/Amapi) Would be nice if Poser didn't mangle them, but oh well.