Looking for some tips regarding Autodesk Maya & After Effects / Element 3D.

I am stuck in a project, I do the modelling and laying out in Maya, I get better rendering results in Maya with textures and materials but the rendering of animations is painfully slow with Mental Ray. I cant really do any of the effects in Maya though

I used to export the scene from Maya to After Effects and do the camera animations and effects but I do notice a difference in the textures, material quality.

Has any got any tips on how to get a middle result, somewhere I can do all of the work and get a good quality result.

Here is an example. I am making a cavern / cave / chasm that will have fog / mist. There are plenty of extras, broken bridge, skull entrances to the caves etc. And there will be monsters, animated who will also be shooting fireballs. I am not a master of animation, modelling etc and have to use the two softwares to get what I want.

This is a screen grab from Maya, which took 10 minutes for a 960 x 540 to render



And this is a test render I did in After Effects / Element

https://youtu.be/eBUbRiV95CM

I can do all the effects in After Effects but better render results in Maya