Well after re-doing the UVs for the character, which had somehow got lost in the transfer of files, I was able to use Zbrush's decimation master to get the character down to a poly count that max can deal with. The Zbrush sculpt was almost 3million polys. The final mesh in the image is less then 100k polys with none of the details lost.
Anyway after decimating the mesh I was able to import and place him within the scene. Now I am Working on the initial lighting setup. The lighting overall is not that hard. The hardest part of lighting is the waiting. Every time there are few changes made you have to render or preview your changes somehow, which means you end up waiting a few minutes. Currently render times aren't that long but it is still a major time consumer.