Recently I’ve been researching a method to pull images of some of my MAYA 3D characters into Photoshop. I needed a way to include them along with other file types in an After Effects movie. I finally figured it out this weekend. During the fall quarter my MAYA instructor taught us how to render images to see how our scenes might look on screen after production.

Well what do you know? That’s all I had to do in order to save my images and use them to update my film. So instead of continuing to waste time Googling for a process to import the 3D geometry into Photoshop, I stuck to 2D. Here’s how it’s done.

When you have your character or scene positioned, lighted and rendered to your satisfaction, go to the Render View menu, click File > Save Image > (enter a File Name) > choose the Photoshop (*.psd) option from the Files of Type drop down and save it to the Photoshop file location where you intend to use it.

When you open the file in Photoshop you’ll see the default “Background” layer. Right click and change it to a layer name just as you would with any imported image file. Now you can manipulate it in the usual ways by scaling, rotating, etc. The one thing you won’t have to worry about is using the lasso, magic wand or any other clean up editing tools because the 2D file will import as a clean image. There won’t be any actual back ground to extract it from and no extraneous border material to erase in order to create clean edges for the figure as you sometimes have to do with sketched images, photographs and clip art.

After you’ve completed your edits you can import the image(s) into your After Effects composition and manipulate them as needed on your time line.

So there you have it. If you’ve been looking for a good short cut between 3D and 2D packages then use these tips to expand your tool set.