I did some close up renders in zBrush because the quality of the video wasn't that great, and a lot of fine detail was lost in the MentalRay render because I didn't have the time to fine tune the displacement setting.
Adding lights to the scene, setting up cameras, tweaking the render settings (Scanline, MentalRay, VRay, RenderMan ect...) and "rendering" out 2D images. It normally isn't done in games, the rendering in games happens in the engine in "realtime".
Yea, try using MentalRay or xNormal, gives you way better results. I know it's a lot of extra work to export all those highpolys/cages to xNormal but it's worth it, had the same "fun" with my P90 :D
Also looking for an answer to this! Does it have a different name? I managed to find something maybe related to this? http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-maya/baking-ambient-occlusion-color-and-light-maps-in-maya-using-mentalray-3/