Thanks!

Looks like the free Riptide hasn't been updated for R12 yet, but Riptide Pro has, so trying the demo of that.

Not quite as flawless as I'd expect from a $50 product though - it couldn't handle quoted filenames, so I had to manually edit the .mtl file to remote the quotes.

After that, it seemed to mostly work, except for the eye textures being weird (transparent?).

But I can probably fix those manually too, so it looks like this will be good enough for now, and I can get on with working on my scene ...except I can't, because I've got too much to do and wont be able to spend time on it today. Oh well, hopefully tomorrow. :)