After some thought I decided I'd probably be able to attain my goal faster using ONLY MED and figuring out the skinning aspect, rather than learning an entirely new 3d modeling software and having to deal with conversion and other potential problems...

So thanks Ulillillia for the suggestion, I didn't really realize this was all that possible before trying it for a couple hours last night.

One great thing I learned about MED is that you can do a great deal of a building's geometry in WED and easily transfer it in. No need to bother with flipping normals and merging vertices in MED.

Also, I was able to figure out how to skin an interior as well an exterior. I was always using 'Create MDL mapping' in the skin window rather than just SELECTING THE FACES I WANT TO TEXTURE and then 'Create MD2 mapping'. Makes my life a lot easier.

At any rate, I'm still looking for a 3rd party 3d modeling software for character modeling (or do you suggest I do this in MED too?!??!) and maybe for some more complex things that aren't blocky or easily transferable from WED (say I wanted to model a realistic-looking tree).

Any suggestions would be appreciated also, any thoughts on Wings3d??