I LOVE Renderman, especially PRman 11

its quality is amazing and now it has GI, caustics and raytracing

the new deep shadows are awesome, they give raytrace quality shadows at the speed of shadow maps (well only very slightly slower than shadow maps)

Oh and there is a work around to get paintfx while using MR or renderman, obviously it requires rendering a pass in MR or renderman.

In the Maya native render globals down in the paintfx tab there is an option to just render paintfx and nothing else, also there is an option to render fur as seperate files. These can then be composited