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
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"…
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.