is there a way to change the default settings for primitives in 3ds max? for example, change the number of segments in a plane from 4x4 to 1x4...just curious
What is the scale of your asset? If this is a gigantic scale, you might be hitting precision or lighting limits. It's best to work within real-world scale. So for example if this was a streetlight or electrical pole, it would be about 12 meters tall.
No, on both counts! Because you'll find as time goes on, progressively modeling objects of ever increasing complexity will require ngons or n-poles or triangles for certain situations where they're unavoidable not too which is really an efficient process in maintaining an effective edgeflow, that usually mitigates shading…
Even in such cases it doesn't prevent you from having perfect shading without any visible pinching by just editing , transferring vertex normals. Nobody used sub-d topology on static meshes in games before. Only on characters. Now it looks like a must for some uncertain reason. Here is an example how with totally "bad"…