Drew
I have Melody, and took a .3ds mesh from rendermonkey, pulled it into melody, reduced it from 63K polies down to 3k (probably could have gone lower, but that seemed like a good round number), and createed a normal map for it. I now have the normal map, skin, and mesh into MED, and a saved model. Can you share your script for how you get it to render. So far, no go for any i've tried in 3dgs. If I can get it working, Ill gladly tell all how i did it.
I must admit, in Melody, I could hardly tell the difference between the two models. I want to make a simple a6 demo that toggles between the default mesh, and the normal mapped one, so you can see the difference.