Here are the results of my first little test. I made this piece of a ship's rigging in Bryce 6 with materials, converted it, exported it to 3ds format, then imported it back for comparison to the original. As you can see the materials suffered a bit from the process but all in all I'd say it works well enough. Particularly true since my interest is to export pieces and use other modelers to bend or shape them in ways Bryce can't, then pull them back in to be incorporated into works in progress. I can deal with materials differences. So my verdict is that it's a *very* useful feature!

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." - Albert Einstein