How to make a quick skin

Here is a cute way to accomplish a cool skin texture with less work then you could possibly believe....
First of all, I am using a incompleted model I did a while back. I think it was like a 67 Buick Riviera... cool boat tail car... either way... here goes.

First thing that you have to know is about smoothing groups. when I finished the body on this car, in order to take good clean pictures to post on LOD, I had to fiddle with smoothing. Now TDR only accepts 1 smoothing group, while Max has like 32 of them. of the 3 stacked cars, the top has no smoohting at all, the second has every polygon set to 1, like TDR would see it if you didnt split the polygons up to make it look like it had more than 1.... the last is with smoothing setup correctly on the car, so it looks good.

You need to create a gray material, with a ray traced reflection, at about 20%, and put a cool looking texture on it... I could get a ways into how this texture should be setup because of how Max sees it, but we will just choose a good house, or something with alot of detail that would ordinarily be around a car(gotta be somewhat realistic here).

OK, next we need to take renderings in the viewports.... This is quite specific... Center the car in the left viewport, where you can see everything left to right. Put some lights about 50-60 degrees angled above the car.... to emulate a sky light... I am sure someone made a skylight for max 3, I know Max 5 has one. This set of lights should be about .5 or .4 in intensity, and do not cast shadows....
Take a snapshot there at about 1024x1024 (800x800 if your screen can't handle it), save it or screen grab it and paste it onto your mapping in photoshop. Go back to max, and change that viewport to the right view. (DO NOT RESIZE, but recenter if nessecary) Take another snapshot, and copy it over into Photoshop, take a front and back the same way, (still DON'T RESIZE) Lastly, change it over to the top, center the car in the view, but don't resize it... the top and bottom will go of the viewport, don't worry about it... it should fit nicely on a square rendering... copy it over to Photoshop....
Resize the images in photoshop, If you car was built straight in Max, then once resized correctly, it should match polygon for polygon in Photoshop. Position all those maps whereever the heck they are supposed to be by using your mesh map(You do have that dont you... LOL)

OK, in Photoshop.... First thing is to adjust the colors to where your map is only a grayscale, I usually just do a "Hue/Saturation" adjustment, under Image, and move the saturation down to nothing...
Make two new layers, one black, one white.make the foreground color in your pallet black, and goto Select-Color Range. Not every model will be the same, so you will have to adjust the fuzzyness... don't for any reason click the picture at the bottom... just leave it at black. The fuzziness tells you much black you are gonna have in your model.... This of course is your taste.
Once you get that done, on the black layer, do a fill, using black on the new selection. The image should get a little darker. Now, delselect everything, and hide the black layer...
Make the foreground color white, and do the same thing as the black in regards to the selecting color range thingy. Fill the white layer with the white...

Now, basically, you have two layers, one white, one black. If you give them a background color, you can adjust those layers opacity to give various amounts of highlight and shadow off to your mesh. The cool thing about all that now is that you can change the color of your car in an instant.