gazebo textured models

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Google recently made me believe that gazebo is able to load 3ds models, but when I try to load a model using a 3ds file as visualization/collision mesh it fails due to .3ds being an invalid mesh filename extension.

What is the current way for loading textured models in gazebo?

Also, is heightmap support already available in gazebo? (I'm kinda confused because the slides from the M3 meeting in July state that v1.0 will be released in october featuring heightmaps but the current gazebo version already is 1.0.2 ... and there is documentation for heightmaps at http://gazebosim.org/api/interfaceHeightmap.html already).

Thanks,
Thomas