Haha no worries :D you should take some time and get in to the new DDO, it will save you huge amounts of time in the end, the new masking system (among other things) is simply awesome! :)
Your importing size is wrong... I have 'units set up' as Generic and 'system unit setup' as 1 unit = 1 inch. The donkey is imported with wallworm, I believe it was from the dota webpage.
Did you scale up the system settings for text, apps and other elements? Using anything other than 100% will screw the UI in any Max version, prior to 2017... http://i.imgur.com/8e9QbjJ.png
There isn't much freedom with glow at the moment, but we are looking into setting up a system that'll give you a bit more control over your glow settings on a layer by layer basis for a future version.
You'd be surprised at how much innovation is born of limitation. With the Wii being a more powerful system, they are allowed to implement more that the Gamecube couldn't handle. But in doing so, they lose what the original so great.
I never realized how fuzzy they actually are, they seemed more... clothy? foam-y? on tv. A velvet shader with fine noise would be easiest. There are fur systems for max and maya, maybe noise in zbrush.
You need to configure your rig and animation so it plays properly. With no joint system you will need to use the Legacy rig; under Animations be sure to set it to Loop so the turbine will continue to spin.
Hi, welcome aboard sounds like a solid plan and there's a ton of options available nowadays for self assembled 3D biased systems on a budget, for further info checkout what people are doing here. Cheers.
Thanks Panda, Sorry, I'm terrible at understanding :) off hues as in slight subtle patches of colour changes? I'm just rendering using Marmo 3 with a 3 point light system and GI enabled.
CAT is a different animation system - it was an xsi plugin that autodesk bought before they murdered xsi. The two aren't incompatible if you know what you're doing but you don't so stick to one or the other.