Poseray does agreat job of converting 3ds files to obj, which open and render without crashes, BUT, you have to make 2 changes in Poseray's groups tab, under the faces,vertices and normals tab, first click Drop y = 0, and then to the right of that under scale and rotation reference point click origin, then all that needs to be done is click the green check mark to update the file before exporting as an object.
If you don't do this all the objects, or at least the ones I have experimented with, will be about half submerged in the surface. SeerBlue