What are some great techniques for creating believable grass? If someone could point me to a tutorial, that'd be great. I work with 3D Studio Max 8. It doesn't necessarily need to be done in 3D Studio Max, it can be done in programming also(such as 2D Sprites).

You can have a bunch of textured quads and maybe make them wave with a vertex shader. This isn't easy for individual blades of grass but for like bushy grass.
I saw a tutorial the other day dealing with a "grass map" which works similar to fur. In fact you could use a fur shader but make it green. Check out this article.