In order to make the linier design sharper you must relinquish all prior modifiers in 3DMax. But his is not as bad as it sounds because hopefully you have plenty of room on your hard drive to make a new scene file calling it whatever this scene is called plus + 1. Just in case things dont work out you always have the last saved file. When you chose those polygons in poly mode, detach them, you can then extrude them from the body and because they have been isolated from the rest of the mesh, you are not accruing a larger polygon count but only in that small area (here a fairly large area) but your not extruding them too far. Only that area that you have selected will become smoother and not the entire mesh object when you apply the Meshsmooth modifier (use edges to modify). Would like to see what you get.