Nah, I tried setting the ambient lighting and how the model is affected by it, and I also made sure the normals were not flipped and it wouldn't work, but I finally figured it out. I edited the material in 3DS max until it had an extremely high specular level and raised the self illumination. It seems that the Panda X exporter causes this problem but its easy to remedy, I'll just have to keep it in mind while I'm modelling.
Thanks for all the suggestions!
EDIT- It also works to just use the Set Object Ambient command with a flag of zero so the object isn't affected by the ambient lighting at all. For whatever reason I kept putting the flag to one when I was trying before.
Neeeeeeeewom!