The buttons and tools move around, change names, etc...but essentially, the techniques are the same.

Here's one trick...

Render out the set but note forground and background objects.
Sometimes you'll want to render background pieces as one animation...
then some mid...
then some foreground...
all for layering with the character in your NLE later.

Now...
in your character scene...
see if you can't put the rendered set scene as a background to this.
If doesn't matter here if the character is in front of everything, you'll just use this for setting up the camera and moving the character about.

Render your shot.

In your NLE, layer all the pieces together.
All the shots should have been rendered with their alpha channels embedded for best results (my opinion) so 32 Targa file sequences would be great.

Note: I'm assuming a lot here.
Assuming the lighting's the same.
Assuming the cam isn't moving.
Assuming the atmosphere settings are the same.
Assuming the cam settings are the same.
Loads of other assumptions.

If any of those assumptions are wrong...
well...there's a process to match each of those as well.

Questions...
why can't they be scaled?

And you should know that there are probably a dozen or so ways to do this...this list should work for you but if you look around, I'm sure there are special ways for Maya users. Your problem won't be Final Cut...but this scaling issue in Maya...which confuses me.

How's this going?

It's going ok. The issue was that this is for a class and the teacher was supposed to supply the character rig. It was taking him weeks to get it to us so I started building my set and adding all my keys and stuff so I could just worry about plugging in the character when I got it. Sadly once I got the guy the rig was so messed up with bones not in the hierarchy, not everything was grouped correctly and named clearly. I just could not scale the character to fit my set and my set was locked down and didn't want to mess with scaling that, but that's exactly what I ended up doing. It took a bit of moving and tweaking but it came together. I really don't like this character and after class is over I'll try to find a better rig and redo the whole thing. I had to squeeze it into about 30 seconds and it really needed to be almost 3 times as long.

Hey Everybody!

Sorry I haven't been very active on this forum lately.
Just been super busy finishing up my film.

I recently did some pretty gruesome make-up on the fly and I thought I'd share it with you all.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/43586104@N07/

I started with some plastic wrap to cover the torso and petroleum jelly to protect the rest of actor's hair & skin.

From there, I mixed up a small batch of flexible adhesive similar to a paper mache recipe, I like to call "Ghoul Drool".

We dipped small strips of Halloween cotton webbing into the mix and layered it up on his upper torso. As the layers were drying, I covered the webbing with skin safe Latex and tissue paper.

After that, I used some grease paint make-up and KY Jelly to finish it up.