Vaguely related tools stuff for people on a budget
(This is an open source C++ image loading library which supports BMP, JPEG, TIFF, TGA, PICT, PNG and PCX. It is fairly easy to use with an OpenGL program.)
(Includes (sometimes complete) information on output formats from a number of popular 3d modelling packages, e.g. .3ds.)
(This links to a collection of shareware tools which can be used to import popular model formats such as .3ds and export OpenGL .c source, similarly to the more professional (and more expensive) PolyTrans program.)
(Another shareware tool which can import model formats such as .3ds and export as e.g. .3ds source.)
(ASE is an ASCII format exported by 3D Studio Max. Source code for the exporter comes with the MAX SDK. One of the programs on this page demonstrates the basics of one way to load an ASE file into memory. In general, this task is probably best approached using some sort of parsing language, such as Lex / YACC or Flex / Bison.)
(.3ds is a binary chunked model format exported by 3D Studio Max. There can be no standard OpenGL loader for it, since there is no real standard in-memory OpenGL representation into which the data could be loaded - OpenGL is a low level rendering API, not a 3D engine specification or scene graph. However, Steve Baker's Simple Scene Graph, linked to above, contains a .3ds loader and works on top of OpenGL, and so may serve as an example of how you might load .3ds models into an OpenGL program.)
(This is the source plus notes for Brad Grantham's stripification code. Note that this exports strips with an undefined winding order. For most purposes you will probably want to modify the code to enforce a clockwise or anti-clockwise winding order on the output strips. A version which enforces anti-clockwise winding is available in the downloads area.)
(STRIPE is another stripifier. The algorithms are markedly more sophisticated than those in Brad Grantham's code above, but there is some question as to how much better the result will be for actual game data containing multiple textures, materials, smoothing groups etc. Note that version 1 of STRIPE was perhaps not an ideally clear piece of source code. I haven't looked at later versions.)