Just made a "complicated" wrought iron 3D piece....here is how:
Took photo of the wrought iron...especially tried to be "square" to the iron face and have white contrasting background.
Used Photoshop to convert to B&W, align, remove any unwanted perspective, cleanup any needed white and black.
Used Ps image in Illustrator and did a "live trace" in "ink drawing" mode, did vector file cleanup as needed, exported as compound path .ai file
Used Carrara 3D to extrude the .ai file into 2.5D and exported as .3ds
Imported .3ds, sized, placed as needed in TFP...render.
So if you find any complex 2D object image, you can make it into 3D (actually 2.5D as it is of constant thickness....but you could do more work and make it fully 3D) and use it in TFP....without using "magenta" to get transparency (compound paths make "holes"). And no long hard effort of tracing to make nice curves etc....let the PC do the work.
EDIT:
see attached 3D render (done in Carrara; I'm still working on the TFP model) for example results...
.3ds file is less than 6K (I could have made the .ai file better with more accuracy and points but also bigger file size....but for the final size/render and that it is supposed to be wrought iron, being too perfect does not look as good anyway)
First of all Doug I'm sorry that I miss your question abut the upgrade-price.
Now to replay on your post.
Have you try to the same in Google SketchUp 7.0, know it is work enven better with TFP v14, and if you take your old skp 5-6 files they open in SketchUp 7 and they convert automatic to skp7 files
Robert