Fixing in other programs what you can´t do directly on Maya

So well... hand in was a couple of days ago and I managed to complete the mandatory minute I committed to. Song is about 4 and something seconds so still a long way to go to complete, which I am positive will come faster now that I am more used to the process. I will keep updating even when is not part of my grades anymore.

Since I got the final countdown fever, I had to prioritize my minutes in order to complete the task so I left some processes undocumented so I don't interrupt the workflow. Now I've got time to get back to them, so here we go:

Solving the render black outline in Maya using Photoshop

Once you render out your targa sequence, you will notice there is a black outline around your visible area:

To get rid of it in Photoshop, I made a selection out of the alpha channel, reduced the size 1 px, created a new layer from the new selection, erased the previous layer and merged.

Tadá!

Then I proceeded to create an action so this process gets automated which I named "border":

 This got me a nice targa sequence without the black border.

Creating shadows in AfterEffects.

So I tried to create render passes using mentalRay materials, and failed miserably. After asking around and doing research, following processes step by step unsuccessfully, I decided to pass on the renderpasses and using curves function in AE instead. For the shadows was also convenient since we had some good green screen cat footage that require also some shadows, and that would be hard to mimic in Maya, so I manually created them directly in AE using solids and masks.

Here we have our lovely shadowless kitten.

and here we have  the manual shadow work in progress.

Here we can see I am a massive idiot for not realizing the green screen fabric had some creases that hide the cat paws at certain point...

... and that's the story why we've got a random pipe popping out in that specific spot in the final shot :D