on that tight ridges i used different technique. I was talking about ball's surface curvature. It should be a bit smoother
when you are adding sphere (or other primitive) you should have access to properties of it, so you can change "subdivisions axis" and "subdivisions height". I can't tell you where you can find it in max, because i'm working on maya. You can start looking around. It should be easy to find.
I was creating it 1 hour but during that hour i was modelling many parts few times to check how effect look like, fixing some place (i was unconciously selecting vertices, edges, faces and motyfing them) and surfing on the internet
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by the way... this is final result after some adjusting some proportions:
by final i mean that i'm satysfied with proportions, but i'm still not sure if adding ridges on lowpoly model is good idea... I could do it on Highpoly model bake it on normal map and achieve similiar effect with a less triangles.