It looks like you have some global illumination or final gathering turned on in your preview settings but not in your final render. If you turn those back on it should look fine.
I assume you're talking about the global controller that moves the whole character. Generally, you don't animate that. You just use it to place your character in the scene in it's starting position.
If you have X amount of documents open you will need to turn snapping on/off on each one. It is not global. And you sure it's not the document bounds that's snapping? It will snap to objects in all layers.
Don't forget that in the Advanced options, search mode is closest to envelope by default, which searches outside. The default search depth of 0.0 sets unlimited depth. http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2012/en_us/index.html?url=files/Lightingshading__Transfer_Maps.htm,topicNumber=d28e525558
Thanks for the reply and the tip ! I have enabled Global Supersampler for 2.5 Star (Hoping it was the right one) And the results are waaay better ! Thanks ! This helped out for the AO bake but is there any way to get the Normals to bake better in Max ? Here is a screen of the normals.
Global symmetry is not what i expected. I was hoping it would be similar to Modo where you can create a sphere for example, and see another sphere on the other side? symmetry modeling on an object level would be much faster than at a component level
I second Scoobydoofus there...try to get the basic shapes of your model done prior to jumping into the detail crazyness ,your model will become a lot more solid and details will be easier to add as you'll already have an idea of the global volumes of your model.
perhaps Customize, Preferences, Viewports tab. Change the value of Non Scaling Object Size to be smaller like "0.1" otherwise working with the transform type in floater [F12] can be useful in that case as well because with the spinners there it responds to the global spinner precision setting.
Welcome to the agony of archviz that is long render times. Obviously, this can be cut a lot shorter by baking in light, or saving the global illumination for a file that is read each frame, instead of recalculating each time.