axsys, I got the shader technique from the following tutorial. Seeiyusha is in Indonesia and does some excellent non-organic work, and his car paint is awesome.

https://www.3dfuturebits.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=134

My rendering settings are as follows:

Mental Ray with no real lights (see the tutorial for the environment set-up). I usually use 1000 FG rays, and a min-max radius of about 0.01 and 1 (but that depends on your scene size). Production quality settings on everything else from the defaults that ship with Maya.

Seeiyusha's paint has a ton of flexibility in it with all the ramps, so have some fun with it and mess around with the settings.