I have designed a model with multiple objects organised in the outliner with parent and child relations. Problem is when I export the model as 3ds, there are no nodes in the resulting 3ds, inly a flat set of meshes.
Likewise when I import a 3ds object that I know has an object hierarchy, it appears in the outliner as a flat list of objects.
I’m having the same problems as OP, as soon as i export my model to 3ds all the parent-child hierarchy is lost, and i can’t seem to find any info on it googling my problem, this was the only thread i could find on the issue.
So… Blender doesn’t support exporting parent-child mesh hierarchys, why not just put that in the documentation? I ended up using a trial period version of 3dsmax to import my 3ds model, fix the hierarchy and export the model again.
The 3rd party software accepted the model and I’m a bit closer to my goal!