I highly suggest you make use of the
Lexicon. It helps, particularly with things like recommended polycount, texture layers, naming etc. Its very very useful.
I don't have any experience in the actual modelling part, just some very basic editing and animation for NWN, but the file side of it I can help with, as well as ascii editing, ascii to binary conversion, How to save the file with GMax etc etc, Texture creation and application.
NWMax sadly lacks a lot of useful information. I've nutted out Gmax in terms of most of the stuff that doesn't require actual skill in 3D modeling and animation, so I can probably help there.