Yes, it varies sometimes so all the professional 3d programs I've seen allow you to change those settings on export. Also, I was still working on your question about 3d rendering because it's something that has always interested me. I've got a few renderers of the pro level even though I'm a hobbyist, but I always keep my eyes open for something I can recommend to a friend. I was just looking at pov-ray again after years. The renderer is still excellent but is only command-line. While looking for a front-end for it I discovered that Pose-ray still works well in windows xp. It is a kind of kludgey interface, but it does exactly what it says. You install it and pov-ray then point poseray to the pov-ray executable. It imports .3ds .pov and .obj well. I tested it out and the only thing I couldn't get was the ground plane and global illumination. It's an extremely simple setup. I really liked it. I'm going to look for other pov-ray front ends, and maybe I'll post a test here if I can get it working to my satisfaction.

P.S. Michael, that seems to have fixed the posting problem. It looks right so far. Thank you.