mvernon:
I did this test image in Carrara 2 and it was pretty simple. There are two objects in the scene: a cube which has been scaled to look like the top of a deck, and a sphere. For the sphere shader I used the chrome shader in the shader tray. For the deck I used a texture map that I got from the web (don' t remember where, maybe from someone here) which I used both in the color channel and in the bump channel. The background is a picture I also got from the web which I tiled with a value of 1 horizontally and a value of 3 vertically.
I also used Anything Grooves (displacement mapping plug-in) on the deck, to give it a more realistic look, but you can get a good result without it also.
Now for rendering:

1. In the scene properties I turned ambient light off and set skylight to 200.
2. I removed the light that Carrara adds to a new scene
3. In the Rendering room I chose Global Illumination as the renderer with the following settings:

• Anti-aliasing -> best (the default, fast, was not giving good results)
• Object accuracy -> 1 pixel
• Shadow accuracy -> 2 pixels
• Indirect Lighting enabled, no interpolation
• Lighting Quality -> good
• Accuracy -> 16 pixels
  The rest of the parameters I left at the defaults.

The rendering took approximately 40 minutes on a PowerMac G4 733MHz with 384MB of RAM.