Throughout these lessons we will use a combination of Maya, After Effects and Photoshop to do everything from the modeling, animating, texturing, lighting and rendering of an animated title sequence. By the end of this tutorial you'll have an understanding of the knowledge required to create a robotic title sequence from start to finish.

We will be introduced to a few tools and techniques to create photorealistic material that is suitable for commercial design projects. By the end of this tutorial, we will have touched on modeling, lighting, shading, animation, scripting and rendering for efficiency and quality.

We will begin this project by manually tracking our sequence in MatchMover and exporting it for use in Maya. We will then take our solved camera into our Maya scene and move our object into place. We will then learn how to capture our 3D environment reflections and create some helpful matte layers. Once we have rendered our Maya sequence, we will learn how to combine all of our images in After Effects. We will learn about processing our background footage to capture traveling mattes, as well as many different ways to combine our various mattes to create effects. We will finish by adding a silhouette and color correcting our images.

We'll begin this tutorial by importing our background plate and creating the text we'll integrate. Then we'll track the background plate and attach our text to the track. We'll then learn about the uses of pre-composing and how to combine various effects to make our text look more three dimensional. We'll then learn how to take elements from our background and layer them into our text to create the illusion that the text is in the scene. We'll finish the tutorial by doing a quick color correction and render out our finished shot!

We'll begin this tutorial by solving four of our shots in MatchMover and combining them in Maya into a cohesive 3D scene. Then we'll create our last camera in Maya and match it. Once all our camera are set-up, we'll learn how to model our object, create dynamics, animate, texture and render our scene. We'll then jump into After Effects to do some color treatment on our backgrounds and then composite our layers together. Now, this is a long project that will take some time to complete. If you get stuck or have any questions, please join our forums and ask. We check the forums often and have a very active and helpful community.

We'll begin the tutorial by taking a look at what is depth-based compositing or layering and why we would want to use it. Then we'll learn about some of the downsides of using this technique. We'll then dive in to After Effects and create a matte for our foreground layer using it's depth map and the background depth map. We'll then learn how to work with depth maps including combining maps from different scene scales, using depth-based layering to fix interpenetration issues and making depth maps human readable and error-free.

We'll begin the tutorial by importing a logo built in illustrator and organize our layers into compositions. We'll then learn some animation techniques to take what would be boring motion and give it some life. We'll then learn how to accurately gauge perspective and how to place the anchor point. Throughout the project we will create animation presets that will save us time on repetitive tasks. We'll learn techniques to reveal and grow elements from simple mask expansions to complex path strokes and mask animation.

We'll begin the tutorial by setting up our motion tracked scene by adding the original footage and aligning everything to make working easier. We'll then bring in our 3d object and learn how to place it in our scene. We'll then learn how to create ground geometry and match the lighting in our original shot. We'll then create multiple render passes and layers to make compositing much easier. After we render, we'll jump into After Effects and learn about such topics as shadow matching, color matte usage and various techniques to match our 3d render with our live action back-plate. The end result of this course will be a final color corrected shot of our 3d object in real life.This tutorial will illustrate an example of how to use Maya and after Effects together to integrate a 3d model into live-action footage. This will allow us to place our own 3d models into real environments easier.

We'll begin the tutorial by importing our elements and tracking various features of the face, including a difficult track through an eye blink. We'll learn how to create a tracked and animated mask to match our eye movement. To combine all of the elements and give them visual appeal, we'll learn how to use several different effects not only by themselves, but also together to create various looks. We'll learn how we can create animation using expressions. And finally, combine all our layers using compositing math to correctly mix everything together.

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.

We'll begin the tutorial by importing our layers and assembling them into a nice render of a car. We'll then learn how to create an advanced matte to cut out our car using the shadow, indirect, and matte layers. We'll then learn several compositing tricks to help us really blend the foreground and background, such as Reflection matching, Lightwraping, color correction and grain matching.