Baking displacement maps in 3Ds Max

[Mechanubis]

Hello everyone. This my first post here, so let me begin by saying that these forums have been very helpful and inspiring duting the past year or so when I've been lurking around.

So anyways...

With the next gen with all it's frightening technology looming in the horizon like a gang of savage thugs I though it would approtriate to start looking into tesselation and displacement maps. My problem is that I can't get them to work. My displacement maps turn out very smooth and bland with very little detail, and when applied to the model, they merely bloat the model so they look like they died in a bathtub and no one discovered their corpses until the smell reached the upper floors.

I use the very standard render to texture method in Max, like I do with normal maps and ambient occlusion. According to some people, this should be okay, but I just can't get things to look right.

I tried applying an AO pass to the height map just for shits and giggles to see if I could boost the details. But obviously it didn't work.

So I'm completely clueless about this whole thing. Should the final ingame lowpolymodel be closer to the final geometry? What's causing the bloatedness? Or is it the entire baking process that screws it up? I tried baking a normal map in mudbox some years back, but that created a very similar result.

If someone here could tell what's wrong or could point me to a decent tutorial I'd be most grateful. Cheers o/