Hi Pilou, that's certainly not bad that there are some plugins and extra steps that you can use to help to clean up .3ds imports...

But it is much better to just have all the data clean right from the very beginning without the need to do extra steps.

I've also heard from people who have had problems getting just the built in automatic soften edges to work completely right on a more complex model.

That's one thing that tends to be a problem with relying too much on extra steps like this, they can sometimes not work quite properly on complex shapes.

If you want to continue to use .3ds export instead of .skp you are certainly welcome to do that though! ;)

- Michael