Maya tutorials: Depth of Field and Software Render Layers

    I decided to push on with the tutorials and managed to complete the Depth of Field tutorial in a good amount of time, which gave me a slightly better understanding of Adobe After-Effects.

    The same however could not be said for the render passing tutorial. Smoothing the car the way I did came to bite me on the backside as can be seen below when it came to the matte render layer for the car. I discovered that single-selecting on a polygon had a chance to have its original non-smoothed wireframe selected and boundary-selecting the polygon not only meant I applied the surface shader to both polygons on the working render layer, but I also applied the shader to every render layer.

     At this point I think I'm going to stop. This is the last push but this is the third time tonight I've made a mistake and have had to remake the render layers mostly from scratch. The only other option I can think of is to render again and delete or isolate the non-smoothed wireframes as I go (for Old Alley I added them to a second invisible layer). But sa for fixing right now I have worked myself into a stressful state so for my sake it might be best to put it aside for now lest I blow a few nerves.