For the smoothness, you may want to use some other format than .3ds. The big issue is accurate normals which is causing all of your issues to loose their smooth shading.

.3ds format is no longer an ideal file format as it once was. The .3ds format has several serious shortcomings, many of which probably stem from the fact that 3D Studio R1 grew out of Tom Hudson’s mid-80’s “CAD-3D” on the Atari platform:

- All meshes must be triangles. – All texture filenames are limited to 8.3 DOS character lengths. – The number of vertices and polygons per mesh is limited to 65536. – ! ! ! Accurate vertex normals cannot be stored in the .3ds file. Instead “smoothing groups” are used so that the receiving program can recreate a (hopefully good) representation of the vertex normals. This is still a hold-over legacy for many animation programs today which started in the 1980’s (3DS MAX, Lightwave and trueSpace still use smoothing groups, and Maya up to v2.51). – Object, light and camera names are limited to 10 characters. Material names are limited to 16 characters. – Directional light sources are not supported.

Fantastic !That must be hard work .I like the details of this model. 5 stars for you.

thanks gsmith for the info i now now what chapes to avoid using..
but i most admit that i like the 3DS format also..

Interesting model, I use Blender so It would be cool if some one could make an import plug in for the 3dxml files …. But Thats why i like 3ds although I have noticed some 3ds files make some objects and meshes go all over so it looks like pieces have been thrown all over the place.

This model look absolutely fine with a blender import.