Since I’m highlighting tutorials I thought I should mention this one over at Cgtuts+. It is an overview of the techniques for global illumination in 3DS Max using three different rendering engines.
Global illumination (often referred to as just GI) is a method for producing more realistic indirect lighting, like the light that bounces around a room. GI produces soft shadows and nice lighting falloff around an object. It can be very compute intensive so there are several ways to produce the effect, some more precise than others. When all you want is the look of GI there is often a technique that is fairly quick and good enough. This tutorial helps sort that all out.
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