Hi there

I'm using Maya 2008 Unlimited on my 2GB Win XP PC and I'm creating two scenes - 1) a closeup of a man's 3D face with hair, Noise/Fractal bump2D and misss_fast_skin and 2) a camera path animation of a still planar image of a sort of scenery so as to pan the camera as if the planar image is a very vast (wide) area - about 100 frames.

Scene 1) - The hair (I'm using aya Hair) can only be rendered with Maya Software but I need misss_fast_skin for the facial skin. Should I use layers in Maya and split up the hair into a separate layer and the face in a separate layer in Maya and render the 2 layers separately - the 1st layer for the hair using Maya Software and the 2nd layer (facial skin using fast_skin) using Mental Ray ? How do I do this using the Layer Editor and then how do I composite them together again? Is there some sort of multiple layer render so that I can render the 2 layers only once ? The complete hair + face is an animation (about 70 frames) so how do I then create an animation after rendering - do I need to multipass render 1 frame at a time (for the 2 layers) up to 70 frames and then put the individual TIFFs or TGAs together in an animation?

Scene 2) - For the planar image, I'm trying to get the camera to pan from left to right following a CV curve animation path so that the scene area in the planar image appears "vast" or "large" but I'm trying to show the whole scene which doesn't leave much scope for panning. How do I give the illusion that the plane image is quite large through camera panning without having to make a 3D model of it ?

Thanks!