problems arising

Ok, I've looked around and it seems that there isn't an obvious, easy and third party program free technique to put 3D into After Effects. That's dashed my plans to make a seamless connection between 3D and the animated characters, meaning that once I've animated the characters, I'm going to have to animate the background in tandem with the character's animation, so it'll pretty much rely on guess work and luck.

Which is an utter pain in the ass really.

regardless, I'll be making my final character designs and testing making a cross hatch shader in Maya some time before Christmas. If that works out, I'll have a wonderful addition to the overall art style.

I intend to achieve this by using the toon functions tri-colour shading. As far as I have found, the toon shaders actually use colours to show light intensity. When I tried to put a texture underneath, I ended up putting the texture on the shade colour only. Theoretically, this would mean that if I created a gif of cross hatching with a transparent background, that should show up instead of the usual shadows.

Experiment time begins...