Hi and welcome!
Currently nearly everybody is using blender here and most of us use gimp, because these tools are free.
So most of us cannot give any tips for 3ds-max, photoshop and glest.
The glest exporter for 3ds max is included in the glest tools ( see download on homepage) is for older 3ds versions ( I think 3ds 7 and 3ds 8 work).
In general:
- Glests models have <1500 vertices but better use less for units which appear very often ( 700-800)
- Alphachannel is used for teamcolor or transparency
- only uncompressed tgas are(currently) valid for textures
- animations have about 10 frames but there are no limits ( missing frames are calculated by the glest engine, try it )
The possibilities to go commercial:
Glests sourcecode is GPL, so if you use this, you have to release all changes in the sourcecode (for free!)
Glest original content works with every license which gives credit to the authors, so here its possible to create your own content(I think for commercial use too ).
But I think most(all?) of us here are creating free stuff(GPL CC or whatever) just for fun and to have something funny to play
.
Sneak a bit around in the forum to see all upcoming mods and decide for yourself with which one you want to go.
I think the guy(modman) who makes the "dark magic" faction curently has the biggest need for new models.