Same problem with the last project solved!!!

ok with the car and fluid completed it was time to render the both out in Maya, but while in the process of rendering out each camera i was shown the same dodgy looking render. Basically in last terms project we were using Maya mental ray physical sunlight to cast the sunset effect from each camera, but not the perspective camera. After setting up the render setting i rendered out each scene file and when i viewed those scene in after effects i noticed that there were no lights in the scene and that the background was black. The only way we resolved this last term was take away the physical sunlight out and replace it with a normal area light, this is why our final version did not look as good as the tests.

ok with the same problem happening to me now i know for a fact that i was going to try and resolve this because i do not want to hand in a lower quality version compared to the test i have produced. Ok so what did to fix this problem was to render the background and the foreground as separate layers. This then enabled me to go in in after effects to position the background correctly, once i found out how to pull this off i was laughing of how simple it was to do.