Using After Effects to composite image sequences rendered from Maya opens up a large number of possibilities and offers flexibility that is hard to achieve using Maya alone. While on the one hand a little extra work, foresight, and some knowledge of After Effects is required, the payoff for the additional effort is usually worth it. You don’t need to master every aspect of After Effects to take advantage of this workflow. A few simple tricks and techniques can add a lot of life and character to your animation. The techniques described in this tutorial are the same techniques used in design houses when creating animations for the entertainment industry.

Maya’s render layers are designed to allow you to break up a scene into passes for compositing. In this tutorial you’ll see how you can create custom render passes, use Maya’s render layer presets, and finally how to combine the rendered passes together in Adobe After Effects as a composition for final out put.

The Maya animation has already been created - you’ll use the scene file originally created for the dynamic parenting tutorial on MolecularMovies.org. This scene simply shows two proteins binding together, the proteins have some Brownian motion added to their movements as they bind together. To keep things simple, the motion of the proteins, which was original created using fractal textures and constraints, has been baked into keyframes. The additional nodes have been deleted from the scene so you don’t need to worry about anything other than the basic animation. The only task you need to accomplish in Maya is setting up the render layers and rendering the various sequences for compositing.

Download pdf Rendering for Compositing in Maya