Lighting and Cameras

Below is the basic layout I used for each of my scenes (this particular one being for the first)

I used a reasonably simple scene layout in Autodesk Maya when animating my characters, lighting the scene and setting up cameras. In each scene, I created a ground plane for shadows to be cast onto and applied 'use background' shaders to them in order to make them transparent in the renders. I also had a plane in the background with a single frame of the video background intended for that particular scene. This was for animation reference and this plane was left out from the renders as the video backgrounds are to be put in during the post processing in Adobe After Effects.

As I am going to render using Mental Ray, I used an image based lighting sphere to illuminate the scene and give it some natural lighting. I then applied 3 point lighting to the characters in the scenes to highlight them and fill out some darkness around them that the image based lighting sphere couldn't light up. I do, however. use the term '3 point lighting' loosely. In many of the scenes a main light, rim light and fill light didn't collectively do the job. I then had to add more point lights (used as the 'fill' lights) to illuminate the characters properly.

Each of my scenes counted for one still camera shot and so each separate Maya scene had the one renderable camera. I just used the standard maya camera (no aim cameras or anything fancy like that) and set a keyframe for it in the one spot it was to film the animation from.