Character Rig setup

Geo character was rigged using skeletons and bind skin and paint skin weight and controls added using constraints and attributes to it. Mirror joint and IK / FK switching also used. 

Rigging the legs. IK handles added and knee controls were also added.

Attributes were added for the toe, ankle, toe roll for the leg control.

Arms and fingers were also rigged and extra arm controls were added to it. 

Controls for each fingers added as well as for the arms.

Controls added to bend the spine using rotation axis. The hip control twist and hip control provides various movement of the hip and other FK controls for the upper spine.

Blendshape was used for the facial expression. Controls were seperately addded for the movement of the eyes and the eyebrows and as well for the mouth to open and close in various ways.

Complete setup of the character using IK and FK to control. 

Layer Passes and Render passes

Decomposing the render into various components at the material level for render passes.

All objects were set on different layers. Render Layers

MasterBeauty, Diffuse, Beauty, Refraction, Shadow and Reflection were mainly attribued to several passes. Final Gather was enabled and ambien occlusion was also given.

After rendering was done in Maya 2014. all the respective files were imported into Adobe After Effects where they were composed and blended accordingly for suitable arrangement.

Final Output

Mental Ray Materials and Textures

Using Mental Ray materials (x_passes), various materials and textures were composed using Maya 2014 where lots of adjustments and tweaking done for the color, specular, reflection, roughness, texture, refraction, irradiance and sub surface scattering before getting the appropriate output. Patience and determination sure are one of the keys. A3 size done. Click to zoom.

Mushroom cloud using Dynamics

Using dynamics and entering various values in the emitter settings in order to obtain an appropriate simulation of the Mushroom cloud in Maya 2014

Window lightfog with particles

Using 3 different batch files namely one with Ambient occlusion, one for the fog and one for the lighting, they were composed in Adobe after effects where dust particles were added on the lightfog and color correction and brightness and contrast (curves) was adjusted. Luma Matte was used in order for the particles to appear only in the fog area.

Reflective caustics of Metallic flower

Reflective caustics done by adjusting the values of caustics to get a fine reflective shadow.

Refractive caustics for crytal

Using caustics in Maya is a fast way to enable lighting and refraction using mental ray.

Animation: Dynamic action

Dynamic action of a kung fu gesture done in Maya 2014

Done from the video reference below: