I would tend to go the other direction with your merge. open your studio scene that is the appropriate size, then merge the object that you want to render into it. That way you will have all of your rendering settings already where you want them every time instead of merging in the studio objects, cameras, and lights, and having to set up the rendering settings each time.
We use a lot of inventor parts in 3ds Max. Depending on the size of your inventor assemblies, there can be significant cleanup work once you get to Max. The cleaner your Inventor scene is, the better. Get rid of any extra sketches, surfaces, or other work features and 2D info in Inventor. Get rid of any factory tables or extra instances of parts. For the most part I would say don't bother with the Inventor materials, it's much better to set them all with textures in 3ds Max.
And as far as the checkerboard plane, make a plane, then make a material in the material editor that looks like the below image (standard material with checker map in the diffuse slot), apply the material to your plane, then play with the size in the checker map to get the pattern to the scale you want.
I mean that there is (over and above the checker pattern) also what looks like major grid lines. These seem to have a bit of depth to them. I assume that they used a very light bump map to achieve this affect. Apologies for the poor explanation earlier. Hopefully it is clearer now. The affect is a little like a clay floor tile with grouting in between.
