So I just discovered there is a package of plugins for maya that you can get off the AREA community...it includes one for importing .3DS files from MAX to Maya, which until now was impossible as far as I was aware, but I tested it and it works.
I'm not saying I didn't know how to work around it, hell in Maya 2013 you can send directly to Max, and vice versa, but someone like me who has an old archive of .3ds files might be too lazy to import them into MAX and send them over.
