hey … i have faced this problem before…
the problem is nothing to do with the code… 8)
in case you are using IntelliJIdea as your editor , just go to settings compiler
and add the ?*.3ds in the box of resource types…
the problem is essentially that Idea does not copy all files by default… XD which is sort of why u get prob
like this…
hope it helps 
Regds
Agentx
Arhhhhhh… all this dancing around the code and the problem seems to be the compiler? Would it be a good idea to expand the wiki to include downloading and compiling jME on jDeveloper and may be a line or two on such common issues?? Any volunteers AgentX <cough> <cough>? XD
I would love to help…
the only problem is that me editor of choice is IntelliJIdea :D…so i could probably write a tutorial on that …
havent worked on Jdeveloper…will c if i do something about it …
this will be done as soon as i get some time… 
hope fully by this weekend
thanks AgentX, I'll keep this in mind and I'm sure it would be good to have something in the wiki for other ide's. At the very least a list of known problems/solutions. Since moving to eclipse, I have not had any issues, so I had surmised that it was a settings issue with JDeveloper, but I had no idea where to begin looking.