Importing Model Files into Alice - Update

Have spent some time this week trying to import objects from varying sources into Alice. As a result of this effort, I have reduced my success rate at this process to well under 50% for getting anything to show up in Alice and still haven't imported anything really usable except from Smooth Teddy (in looking thought the references, I see that was one of the sources of objects for Alice 1.0).

To illustrate the problems even with "success" - I did get a free Stormtrooper model (from http://www.3d02-ae.com/html_3d_Model...in_3M00487.asp) all the way into Alice and actually tried a couple of the textures that came with the model. Really very impressive except that the model hierarchy didn't come through (see the notes in the Alice importing tutorial for how to fix this), and now all I have to do make this model usable is to correctly restore the hierarchy to an object with over 90 sub-objects .

Except for two notes - I won't go into the programs, file types, etc. I tried - the only consistent thing was that the more familiar I was with something, the higher the success rate. The first note is that I was impressed with Biturn - it tried it's best on everything and it's error messages were usually helpful. Second, I had zero success with .wrl (VRML) model files - a surprise since I thought it was a general standard. Anyone have any ideas? I know Blender is supposed to be able to do this but I couldn't get it to work (files were from http://shape.cs.princeton.edu/search.html ).

Jim