After wasting about 2 hours of time figuring out why maya didn't have mental ray in the rendering settings options list, I finally figured out it was because I'm not omniscient as the programmers of maya clearly expected me to be when they made the genius decision of disabling the mental ray plugin in the 2011 version and moving things around. Anyway, I eventually found out how to enable it in the plugins by going to Window>Setting/Preferences>Plug-in Manager and then tediously looking for the words mental ray in that list, again apparently I was expected to know "mr" amongst lots of other random letters actually stood for something.
Here are some of my attempts at achieving a realistic metal reflective surface using mental ray.
The first image was my first attempt, however the reflections in the sphere looked warped, to fix this I changed the mapping of the background from spherical to angular. For some reason this made the surface underneath the sphere turn white, who knows why, it's a mystery. Probably because I hadn't set the material of that surface correctly.
Finally I played with the lighting of the sphere to get something I am quite happy with, a realistic looking result.
Apart from all the waffle about irrelevant things and random movements of the mouse as if he was suffering withdrawal symptoms I found this tutorial quite helpful http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjnuPpNQkew&feature=related
For the background I used an image from the "light probe image gallery" on this website http://ict.debevec.org/~debevec/
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