The Following exercise is just that, an exercise in getting a little more cooperation out of After Effects using Maya. It's not really about actual Z-Depth in After Effects, but Fun With Matte Keys instead. 1- Lets start with two planets, Earth and it's satellite, the moon (two spheres w/ the appropriate texture maps)

2- Set up a simple, 2sec. Move w/ the moon revolving around the earth, I'll wait.....

Save the file as "planets1.mb"



3- Now we all know that this scene would take no time to render in its complete form, but that's not the point of the exercise. Render out each planet separately, with its render globals complete. Call one rendered sequence "earth" and the other "moon" (duhhh).

Do this by saving just the "Moon" layer as "moon.mb" then rendering it. Do the same with the "earth" calling it earth.mb"





Lets review: You should now have-

1- a file called planets1.mb

2- a file called moon.mb

3- a file called earth.mb

4- and two sequences of images, one of just the moon and the other of just the earth.



4- Now, reopen "planets1.mb" and go to the multilister (or Hypershade). Change the moons shader to a solid white and the earths to solid black Resave this file as "MoonMat.mb". Reopen "planets1.mb" and do the same for the Earth (Earth white - Moon Black) save this as "EarthMat.mb". If you are familiar with After Effects 4, you already know it is really picky about file names. So before you render these two mat animations you'll need to get creative with the sequence names. Call the moon matte sequence "MatM" and the Earth sequence "MaskE"



Render, again I'll wait....

5- Open AE. Import all your sequences into a new project.



6- Layer the sequences so that the mask layers are above the respective image layer



7- Highlight the image sequence called Earth, then under Layer/track Matte/ select "Luma Matte"

Repeat this for the Moon Sequence



8- Preview and see the moon disappear behind the earth.