Avengers Assemble - Vehicle

So yeah this vehicle project is just about to wrap up, the deadline is Friday but just like any other project this year we have got permission to tweak them at a later time for our portfolios. I chose to model the Quinjet from the recent Avengers film, just cause it looks awesome. I should be told off for running with terrible reference, and trying to guess some of the geometry. The limited concepts and the final product were kind of different, so I tried to find a delicate balance between the two. The concepts were better for reference than me pausing the Movie for screenshots, but the thing is I wanted it to look more like the movie one rather than the concept. Then I ended up putting my own twist on it, but keeping it fairly recognizable.
      Anyway, the thing with this project is there seems to be something slightly off putting about the way were supposed to present the work. I have no issue with the subject matter, I like vehicles and environments but its this whole screen grab from max, viewport shaders and touch up with Photoshop that I just don't quite grasp. If I'm going to be honest, we should really be demonstrating how things look in a proper game engine; seems we have access to both CryEngine and Unreal I just don't see why we aren't using them. I complain because the vehicle looks kinda bad in the MAX view port, and too make things worse it just doesn't look that great using the Xoliul shader either. When I render it looks fine, but that too isn't a good representation of in-game graphics.

Max screengrab - Running off the Nitrous driver (Realistic with Materials)

Render :(

I've configured the driver to set view port textures to the best resolution it can provide, and thats basically the result I got ^. I have an inkling that the problem is to do with the diffuse being pretty much grayscale, and some kind of graphic compression is causing this.

I may have left it a little to late to start fixing these problems, especially the Xoliul shader because that's what the brief requires, but as an alternate I just built up the vehicle again inside Unreal and took some screengrabs. This is the result.

So of course there is a difference, but still unsure if this is permitted for the marking. I'm finding it quite frustrating that everyone else seems to get there's looking rather sweet in MAX using Xoliul, and as the brief states to use it for real time screen grabs I feel like I'm not going to do as well as I should. On the other hand I feel more comfortable presenting my work by using an in-engine screen grab because that's essentially what all game models run in, not 3ds Max's viewport.

Anyway heres's more presentational stuff:

Max renders!

wireframes!

I'm gonna come back to this model, just so I can fix some of the problems aswell as continue with it. I still need reflective maps, to give the metal look it doesn't quite have yet. The model is around 6,300 tris I believe, which gives me roughly 3700 tris to mess around with. An interior is priority, landing gear would be cool but the wheels will eat up more triangles than I can bargain for.

EDIT

Okay so I sorta managed to set up a shader in Max, not the xoliul but the Car Paint shader Codemasters provided for us. I broke down the original example file, which I really should have done in the first place and saw that the body of the phaser tank was using this shader instead of xoliul, so I tried it out on the Quinjet. It works a lot better. The diffuse is still a little flat, it needs more texture to it so I guess that's my next task.

looking better

return to the sky - realtime this time

Photoshopped version. Still messing around with editing screengrabs.
The reason this one is sharper is because I managed to up increase the anti-aliasing
in Max's driver configuration to max (8x I think) its essentially the same as the one above it but with smoother lines.