Sorry to bump this thread after all these years.

I've been playing with Ivy Generator and I found that if you import the obj mesh into Meshlab it will export perfectly to 3DS for use in SKetchup, including textures, as long as the mesh has less than 65536 vertices.

Note that Meshlab 64 bit does not support 3DS export, so you have to use the 32bit version.

Hope this helps.