Introduction to Render Layers|VFX

As a part of our introduction to render layers in Maya we were asked to follow simple tutorial and created a video file in After Effects.

I might be not using Maya in making my final video, however I found today lesson useful when it comes to quick prototyping and checking how things will look like in the end.
Creating new render passes works very similar to layers in Photoshop. Keeping all those different effects separated makes editing effects in After Effects very easy (each pass will be rendered as a separated image sequence).
I've added my own images as a texture to cube.

Reflection pass - first render done with cube, second without, since the cube itself isn't needed in this pass (will be visible in colour pass).

Occlusion pass (that look like Pokoyo animation) is the only pass that doesn't need alpha channels and need to saved as a jpg (other passes need to be in .tiff, .targa or .png format). Self shadowing is only needed between those 2 objects and (same as any other pass) can be changed in After Effects.

After all passes were batch rendered I moved to After Effects to put image sequences together, played a bit with layer settings for each sequence (pass), added back plate and produced final exercise scene.