With the release of Autocad 2007 Autodesk has officially abandoned the .3ds file format export in favor of allowing 3d Studio Max to import the .dwg format directly from Autocad.  Unfortunately if you don't have max or a program that can open the .dwg format this means that Vue will no longer be able to import Autocad generated models (the dxf import has never worked for me at all, probably because there are so many variations on the .dxf format)

At any rate, I thought I would share this disconcerting news, I have posted a query to eon over on their forums to see whether or not there's anything they can/will be able to do on there end, since Autodesk has made it clear (our CAD support department posed the question of what do do on there end and got the response of  "open the dwg in max and save it out" ...not particularly helpful if you don't have max and don't want to spend 5k on a file converter :)  If they're going to force me to buy max I may as well learn it and move all our renderings to max and abandon Vue.