Hi,
I would like to rendering my first maya scene, but I'm confused. The scene is simple, here it is. The jar has a mental_ray dielectric material (I couldn't make nice glass with maya shaders 
), but I would like to render use render layers/passes in order to separate background and jar, so speed up my render, and after learn a little bit of nuke compositing. But how can I separate the background and the main? Because the background is visible in the jar, because of the refractions...
I use two directional light as key and fill,d but the shadow of the jar is not transparent, and in the jar there isn't any shadow. I think the jar's shadow is not a big problem, maybe it can be made a separate r.layer/pass and I can combine in nuke. But the inner... Should I use some linked lights in the jar? Or something else?
I tried to make ao, but the main theme is in glass, so it doesn't work..
How does a professional do scene like this? Would you give me some advices/links?
thank you very much