Since Ben Fox has started working with us, I’ve learned a lot. One thing I learned is that I’ve been doing things the hard way (or at least terribly inefficiently). One of the tools he introduced me to is UV passes in Maya. UVs are just floating numbers between 0 and 1 that designate what pixel should be seen where. It’s for that reason that you don’t necessarily have to apply textures to your models in Maya. You can just apply the textures in your compositing software (in our case After Effects). There are some limitations with this method, such as reflections or final gathering that would be calculated when you add your texture in After Effects, but for simple things it works very well. In the past I would output an image sequence for an animated texture to bring into Maya, but by using this method I can just apply it to the UV output that was set up in Maya.
How do you apply a UV pass in Maya? Apply this shader to any object of your choice (which was quickly put together by Ben for me). Then rendering with a 16 bit or higher image format that allows you to bring the sequence into After Effects and apply your own texture using this effect made by François Tarlier called ft-UVPass.Be sure that your Project Settings in After Effects are set to 16 bit as well. Excelsior!