In this series of lessons, we will be taking you through the process of rendering your Maya scene into multiple passes, and using some advanced techniques for compositing these passes using Toxik.


We will dedicate the first portion of this course to using Render Passes in Maya to separate various elements of our scene at render time. We ll use mental ray s render passes, contribution maps, custom framebuffers, and render layers to create the necessary render passes for our scene. In the second portion of this course we will begin with some quick compositing similar to our Compositing 3D Renders in After Effects course, but we will quickly get into more advanced topics such as basic and advanced Depth of Field, Proxies, spot paint fixing and chromatic aberration.

Lesson Outline

1. Introduction and Project Overview
2. Preparing Maya scene for multi pass rendering
3. Creating Contribution Maps for multi pass rendering
4. Setting up render passes in mental ray
5. Using Custom Color Buffers to render specialized passes
6. Creating new Render Layers and using Layer Overrides
7. Importing our render passes and creating Proxies
8. Using Blending Modes to composite our ant
9. Color Correcting various passes with effects and masks
10. Creating a Lightwrap to tie the Foreground to the Background
11. Tweaking our Matte to Remove a Black Outline
12. Painting our Matte image to fix issues with the feet
13. Setting up a Basic Depth of Field effect using the Depth pass and Color Correct
14. Adding to our Depth of Field with another Blur Effect
15. Adding Depth of Field to the background
16. Fixing haloing by extending the Depth with a basic Minimax
17. Advanced Minimax Layering to correctly extend the Depth
18. Using an Expression to simplify the Minimax layering
19. Fixing the depth matte and the ant matte to remove DOF errors
20. Adding Chromatic Aberration to our image
21. Adding and Tweaking Grain for that final level of detail