3DS actually supports animations, but only keybased ones, which means that you have e.g. a cube and then 3DS stores some frames with different rotations, translation and scale. But sadly animations with 3DS are very poorly documented and it seems that even the exporter auf Autodesk's 3DS MAX doesn't export them right. So better forget about using 3DS with animations (I'd tell you how much time I wasted on that matter, but I'd make me a bit angry ).