Under the Common Tab, set the image and pixel size. If I was using this project for TV, I can use these setting to get the correct size required: 720x480 and Pixel Aspect Ratio to: 0.900. Remember to assign the camera you want to render, the image format, and the way you want sequenced file names to be created (I always render in my images as Targa files, because they include the Alpha Channel info).
Remember to check Alpha Channel to composite later
Now it’s time to render : About layers (part 2)
When you are rendering your preview frame, you will notice that something is taking a long time to render. One of the best ways you can optimize time is by hiding some objects, you can then save different files to render these objects separately.
First save out a scene where all the scenery is visible, then turn off the character layers and then render it out again. Sometimes, I will only be requiring the ground, maybe just a wall or some other object, so render out each of these by going through the same process as above, but make sure you name each layer accordingly ground.mb, wall.mb or object.mb.
As well as the above, I will save a scene displaying only my characters, inorder to render them separately. The characters always take longer to render because they move and have way more textures attached to them than anything else in the scene.
About the Shadows :
Sometimes, when the scenery render time is not too long, I render it out with the shadows, if by doing this it is affecting too much of the render time, render the shadows separately. This is how I do in both cases :
Case 1: Scenery includes shadows : To make the scenery, shadows and characters invisible:
1: Access the object properties (in Maya press ctrl+A).
2 : In the 'render stats' section, uncheck the primary visibility stat of every character. Be sure the cast shadows stat is turned on
I will do this for every object that I want to produce shadows while they are invisible.
