This has been a good week for productivity. This was because I was able to make some breakthroughs regarding the backgrounds for the characters. I was toying with making geometry for the buildings and saw that that was going to be too time consuming, even though it was progressing nicely. I also saw that the final output was too graphic and resembled the foreground too much. I had success with using an image plane behind the characters but found it redundant to separate it from the foreground in After Effects in order to to manipulate focus and the filters I wanted to apply to it. I tried another means of image plane by applying a file as a texture to a plane and got good results with that. However I think I'm going to go with a look that I get when I use the cutout filter in Photoshop and add a gradient and blend them with a Hard Light blending mode. The composting then takes place in After Effects. The only difficulty I'm having now, regarding this is composting shadows to make the foregrounds and backgrounds match. I don't seem to be able to composite just shadows without geometry. I may try making an imitation ambient occlusion renter by making all the geometry in a white shader that does everything that the regular scene does and using that as my shadow pass. I'm seeing that the illusion of light and shadow really integrates the the elements within a scene. I like the combination of a flat image that looks three dimensional because its taken from a photograph and a flattened 3D Maya model with just a hint of volume via a blended beauty pass.