Compositing Particles in After Effects

[tonny]

I created a shooting star effect with some spot particles that follow a star object. I did a hardware render and now I want to bring it into After Effects to composite into a scene. However I have no idea how to do this. I turned on the Blue Alpha Channel, I then saved the FCheck animation as a Maya IFF file.

Now I dont know how to put this animation into After Effects. How do I get from 60 still IFF images into one animation? Do I have to put every single IFF file into the comp one by one? I also do not see a blue background on these IFF files. Is it possible to just software render spot particles and forget about compositing?

Any advice would be great. Thanks.

[failure]

When importing, select the first file in sequence and choose to import the sequence ( option is somewhere in the import window ). The sequence will be imported as a video clip

For start, render your particles on black background and use 'screen' layer mode in after effects. That should do the trick for simple scenes.

I'm not sure if after effects can read iff file. You can use maya's imgcvt utility to convert them to some format that after effect can import ( 'tga' is ok choice )