Lighting & Rendering in 3Ds Max

1.  I downloaded his file so that I would be up to date after he added dynamics. I was hoping this would fix my material visibility problem, but it hasn't and the particles look weird too. I'm not sure what to do...

2. Adding basic light parameters in 3Ds as coloring, shadows, types of lighting, intensity, etc.

3. Understanding diffuse and specular components.

The left image is a render with ambient lighting off and the second image has ambient lighting turned on. 

4. Utilizing the object properties window.

First image is with shadow turned off, second is with reflect turned off, third is not visible in camera (although the shadows and reflections are still visible), and the fourth image shows the right object completely turned off in the render mode. 

5. Changing the default renderer to Mental Ray 

6. Setting up imaged based lighting and adding an environment.

7. Working with additional lighting sources in 3Ds max

8. Optimizing render speed by turning off the shadows, reflections, etc. and reducing the amount of particles in the scene.  

9. Fine-tuning particles and other materials 

10. Adding motion blur and improving the the rendered image quality 

11. Outputting the final animation from 3Ds max 

This is a view of the animation from the viewport because the rendered animation would have taken forever. 

12. Converting an image sequence to a movie file. 

I watched the process but do not have a finished product because I did not render out a image sequence.