Hello pears, new to this forum, old in the field, in fact the last job I applied for, replied with “We hired 2 younger guys…”
Well what can one do, with all that great talent out there, the competition isn’t easy. Anyway, lately I have been focusing on mental Ray for photo real images. I like the results with still images, but horrible artifacts with animation, unless the scene is pretty simple.
I find renderman to be a better solution for all the global, caustic and occlusion solutions, when rendering animation.
This Image was created with Maya and Mental Ray on a Mac - A touch of photoshop, but the focus was on the render caspabilties.
Please let me know what you think, I always could use another opinion.

It also has an animation of particle drops, that is not displayed in the still image.
you can see more online at www.visionanimations.com
Also… the scene around the object has to fit… for instance inside a fridge.