You will have to apply operations either to the 'root node' of the heirarchic model or directly to one of its children. Also, you may have to load and apply textures manualy (if not doing so already, I cant even remember if 3DS automaticaly loads textures with model?).
Basicaly, a heirarchic model has a tree like structure starting with the 'trunk'. It may be a useful exercise to write a test program which simply parses the model structure and prints all the child entity names to the screen. You could then modify it to show parent/child relationships. Once you have done that, you are well on the way ;)
All the best,
Rhy
PS - here is the child entity function. There are others, but this is the one I use (credit to Beaker).
http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=796
Basicaly, a heirarchic model has a tree like structure starting with the 'trunk'. It may be a useful exercise to write a test program which simply parses the model structure and prints all the child entity names to the screen. You could then modify it to show parent/child relationships. Once you have done that, you are well on the way ;)
All the best,
Rhy
PS - here is the child entity function. There are others, but this is the one I use (credit to Beaker).
http://www.blitzbasic.com/codearcs/codearcs.php?code=796