This tutorial is a continuation of the “VIllus Capillary” tutorial where you went through the basics of creating a Maya scene from A-to-Z. You’re now ready to stitch together a final movie from the individual sequences of images that were rendered in Maya. In addition to simply ‘stitching’ the sequences together, we will explore a few different compositing tasks as well. For example, there are benefits to rendering a single image/shot into multiple ‘render passes’ where different elements of the scene are separated out onto different layers and rendered independently with an alpha channel (i.e. transparency information).

These passes need to be overlaid and blended together in ‘post’ (i.e. in a compositing package like After Effects). With this extra step you gain additional control over processes that would otherwise take longer to render ‘in camera’ (i.e. in your 3D package). We will composite together one of the sequences from your movie in order to add fake depth-of-field effects (i.e. blurring), a process that can be tricky and processor-intensive at render time in Maya. Begin by opening the After Effects program – the standard layout for this application (v7Pro) contains a number of preset panels:
- the “Project” panel in the upper left: this is where you can import and organize the raw materials for your final composite
- the horizontal “Timeline” panel at the very bottom: it show layers on the left and the actual timeline (and any keyframes you will place on it) on the right.
- the “Composition” panel to the right of the “Project” panel is where you can preview the visuals you are working on.
- the “Info” “Time Controls” & “Effects” panels on the right. While the first 2 are somewhat intuitive, it will be easiest to find things in the “Effects” panel by using the text search box a..

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