Honestly that CGrats tutorial is your best bet. It shouldn't take you more than 30 min to do that tutorial, and it can easily be translated to any model you want to show off. Ambient Occlusion will make any high poly model look good, and that tutorial shows you exactly how to do it.
And hopefully without taking a week to render a single frame. I'm using 3DS Max, and I've never really had much luck with rendering, light set up, or pretty much anything involving hitting F9. Because I am so bad at it, for the most part I avoid rendering all together, or just take viewport screencaps. This is really…
I think you are putting to much effort into this program in hopes of getting some nice renders. You do not need professional level ILM type stuff here, you just need to learn to use 3DS Max effectively to show off your models. You have to remember you are not trying to get a rendering or lighting job, so why waste time…
I knew about Marmoset and Xoliul already but those are more for game-ready stuff was my understanding, right now I am working on highpoly. I know I don't need professional level lighting skill or whatever, the whole reason I came here for originally was just some cut and dry straight forward 'Do exactly this, this, and…