Ok..one of the obstacles is how MAX creates reflections. Basically, it renders various images that are mapped onto the object, thus creating reflection. This is both good and bad. Good, because it is faster than RT, and bad because it isn?t that accurate. You have two different kinds of reflection; flat and non-flat. The flat is for mirrors and the like, while non-flat is for rounded objects, such as spheres. So, for a water-surface, which do I use? The flat reflection looks good if you?re just out to have a nice calm pond. But once you want ripples and waves, you?ll need something else. The non-flat reflection (called Reflect/Refract in MAX) can do this to a certain degree. A non-flat reflection on a flat surface will look bad; it will be terribly blurred and won?t show much. So you?ll need either a space-warp to create ripples or waves, or you?ll need a bump map. Here is a quick walk-through on how to create simple water surface with the standard maps in the 3D Studio MAX materials editor, without using ripplse/wave effects. This is a way of doing it with a material. Bear in mind that this is not an accurate way of creating water, and will probably not look good in all scenes. After experimenting with it, it seems that you?ll have the bet result when using it in a scene consisting of a landscape, such as a pond.
I used a mask with falloff in the Reflect channel to have the metal reflect more with increasing perpendicularity to the viewer. This is a real-life phenomenon that occures to any shiny surface; a ceramic coffee mug will actually reflect along the sides perpendiular to you. (in fact almost any surface will change its look depending on the angle it's seen from). For chrome, add full Reflect. Silver has a slightly lighter Diffuse color and is less reflective than chrome.
For complete realism, what you actually want is a full volume render of your surface. When dealing with, for example, polygons, we're dealing with a surface, not a volume. If you've ever taken a sphere and deleted some faces, you've noticed the sphere is in fact hollow. A volume means at any point inside that sphere, there is still sphere, not empty space. The two main problems with this approach though involve speed and the data set. First, calculating a full volume gets very slow because of all the info you have. And then there's the question of how do you generate that information? Say you have a human muscle you want to render volumetrically, you now need some way to specify information about every point inside your surface. Do you want to start modeling every atom that makes up your object? Because of these factors, volume rendering is still somewhat impractical for mimicking say the way light reacts to human skin (in the entertainment industry anyways, volume rendering is being heavily researched in the medical industry as it relates to the human body). This desire to simplify is a lot like how the artistic wants to avoid worrying about the chemical composition of your material. "Can't you just give me a button that makes it look cool?"