I’m creating an animation of a character swinging a golf club, and the club, of course, appears both in front of and behind parts of the character. I have mental ray set up to save render layers out to .psd files for compositing – but I’m having trouble with the matte layer. I can’t get the matte to “cut out” the parts of the club which are behind the character. If I have both objects in the same layer, then any material overrides – where the opacity is set to “black hole” – gets applied to all materials, and if I have the objects in separate layers, the matte doesn’t know where the cut-outs should be...

Could someone be kind enough to explain this process for use in animation? Or if there are books which include this subject in detail, or tutorials, etc, please let me know...
I’ve looked in all my Maya books and done a Google search but can’t find anything more than a few lines on this rather important topic. (And maybe it’s me, but I find the Render Layer Editor rather confusing...)

Any help greatly appreciated.