If you want thickness transparency and cutoff opacity in mentalray could be limiting.

Vray has some features that would work.

But for this I would consider using illustrator and then import the line art and use bevelplus in maya. Some of the bits are quite thin so you may have to fidget with those a bit.

I'd do an example but maya is currently borked on my systems. Hoping maya 2014 will be more stable with my hardware.