This is mostly about lighting. Materials need to be tweaked to support the lighting and rendering, but mostly you need to learn how to light a scene. We have some good resources here about lighting http://wiki.polycount.net/CategoryLighting The help file in Max is a good place to start, for scenes like your examples above.…
Not sure where else to post this, as it's a question regarding rendering in 3D Studio max I've been modeling game assets and messing around in 3D for some years now, but never got the hang of rendering or felt the need to learn. I'm so used to modeling, uving and texturing my models in Photoshop. Now I need to learn how to…