GUYS! I had this really freaky dream that the AVA was due February 5th! Freaked me out.
In other news, here's a little scene I cooked up of the rare Wild Utah Teapot in its natural habitat. As you can see, it's a bright sunny mental ray day, which brings me to my actual topic.
I highly recommend considering selecting the mental ray renderer as your production renderer. It used to be that you had to shell out additional $$$ for finalRender or Vray to have an alternative to the obsoleting 3ds Max scanline renderer, but not since 3ds Max 6. Not only will mental ray probably render your existing scenes faster, but also offers many, many more advanced features and tweaks.
Check out the above picture. Mental ray features include one-pass depth of field, fast SSS-like shader, and and fast GI calculations. The render time was about 4 minutes, with about 200k triangles.