Simon's lesson: Image Planes and Batch Rendering

In Simon's lesson today we created a few polygons, rendered them and then imported the render into Photoshop where we painted over and then put it back into Maya as an image plane and material for the polygons. We then added a sphere attached to a curve to create an animation, batch rendered it and made it into a video in After Effects.
This Maya/Photoshop technique is ideal for times when there is no camera movement required.