if you are referring to the smooth mesh option in maya display (when you press 3) then thats not quite the same for final render... go to mesh and choose smooth, you will see exactly what maya does, the only difference is in the viewport you will not see the complete wireframe. for final render i dont think its nessesairy to use smooth mesh in every case, because they take render time. instead of using smooth mesh i think they manually use tools like bevel and add more polygons to the areas that are in need of quality, rather than adding unnessesairy polygons to areas where they arent needed.