Ahoi mate, I made a simple scene in maya2011 with all items necessary for your needs. It is set up in linear workflow how I use it on regular basis at our studio. Please have a look at the hypershade. I made a bookmark for you there called "setup". Here you can see all the shader, camera and environment connections. Please also take a look at the renderGlobals. The settings there depend on what is to be rendered (reflection/refraction counts, quality etc). Don´t mind the poor outcome of the rendering since I didn´t invest any time in tweaking the shaders, hdri (which is quickly made in photoshop), and scene overall. But I hope it clearly demonstrates how to devide beauty from reflections and shadows from a technical point of view. If anyone points to -> why not use render passes? Unless we get an updated version of maya in the studio I stopped trying to make use of render passes in linear workflow a long time ago since autodesk never got the programming right. things to have a look at: 1) Hypershade - bookmark:setup 2) renderGlobals 3) overrides and settings in the shapeNodes of the objects 4) renderlayers Hope that helps! Good luck!