Hey Musashidan! I just got around to trying out your tutorial and I wanted to say thanks again and also to FortyNights who also suggested Face-Weighted Vertex Normals! That most-definitely fixed the problem. For anyone else who might come across this and read it: I grabbed the Scripts for max for the Weighted Face Normals…
Tidy up the topology and use one of the many free FWVN scripts. Here's a tutorial from my youtube channel that explains and shows examples of face weighted vertex normals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kizs6RIa1dQ