i'm new with 3dsmax, but i'm good at making meshes in it, could you possibly wrap some planes i've made?
can you also make emmisive specular and the like skins?
check my model gallery for some of the planes, you would be able to skin them as you wished, it would free up my time into working in the object editor
for the type of vehicles, i'm going to make a list of ground based japanease and allied tanks.