Using Blender to rendering LDraw model

[Travis Cobbs]

I've heard that Blender can read the 3DS files produced by LDView, but it takes a long time to do so (possibly hours for a large model, while appearing locked up the whole time). I successfully imported the car.dat sample model a while back, but even that took a while, and that's a very small model. Also, since the files LDView produces include the original hierarchy from the LDraw files, they are difficult to manipulate, because the parts themselves are broken up into multiple sub-objects (one for each primitive).