Just an illustration with the lions.
I used Maya for modeling, MR for rendering and Shave and Haircut for fur.
Textures, compositing and postwork with Photoshop.
The original image resolution is 3800x2375 and it took forever to render it out!
For the main pass I used medium quality render settings with FG and DOF.
The shadow raytracing quality wasn't high enough so I had to do some postwork to fill some "black" pixel.
I blurred some hard edges and make some correction to the contrasts and color gamma.
Finally I 've rendered the occlusion pass in separate parts and composited in Photoshop.

I hope you like the final result

C&C are welcome