A tip Joey, if you render in mental ray you can use the approximation editor to get smooth geometry for rendering. Go to window - rendering editors - mental ray - approximation editor and under subdivisions hit "create". This will give you an approximation node where everything looks the same in the viewport but your geometry renders perfectly smooth without having to keep tons of polys in the viewport as you need to take the smoothing level up quite high for close ups on photorealistic renders. It is really useful in general for high poly models, I was rendering a tie fighter the other day and with smooth geometry it has 400 000 faces which slows my viewport down, so using an approximation node in cases like this makes life a lot easier.

If you want something really nice for metal you'll need to use mental ray materials, they're a bit more complicated than Maya materials because they have more attributes but the tool tips work so they'll tell you what something does and you can just try it out by test rendering and experimenting. You have metallic paint shaders in mental ray but the material you really want to learn is the architectural material mia_material_x, it can be used to create anything and if you look at the top under presets you'll have some for chrome and copper I think to give you a general idea of how the settings would work for metal if you wanted something like steel and you can try creating your own custom shader based on this. It will take a bit of tweaking, for brushed steel if that's what you'd want you'll need to add anisotropy because it's the fundament for any kind of brushed metal.

Hope that helps