Attached are an image and brief video of a fairly successful download from the TrueSpace 3.2 website and subsequent conversion and import of the image into Alice. It illustrates fairly well what "success" in this case actually means.

First, note that this is a fairly good quality image - nice shading, color, detail, etc. - but still very obviously a "low" polygon count character. With a little animation, smoke effects added around the cigar, tank background, more dramatic lighting, etc. - this could be a key character in a nice short video. ("Patton in Aliceland"?)

Second, even with the low polygon count, there are still nearly 50 separate objects involved - with no hierarchy from the simple import/conversion. Alice will let you add "vehicle of" relationships to simplify animation - something that would be both non-trivial and essential.

Not obvious from the pictures is that this is not an articulated model, even though TrueSpace does have that capability. Thus the actual animation step will have to carefully avoid creases between objects, unnatural movements, etc.

No real "bottom line" to this posting other than I was impressed at what "simple Alice" could actually do. Just read that the movie "Kung Fu Panda" used nearly 400 full time animators - don't even want to think about the computer resources. The particular animator being interviewed was in charge (seriously) of the "jiggle" of the panda stomachs.

(Minor obvious note to Gabe and any others administering the forum. When 2.2 is released with video files, it would be nice to have those formats added as allowed uploads - compressing say .wmv via zip, for example, really doesn't reduce file sizes very much.)