After rendering out my animation I noticed that the bounce light from my white ground plane was too strong on the feet, which lessened the believability of the composite. In order to make it feel real, the bottom of the feet needed to be dark on contact, and then as they pull away from the surface, they will receive more bounce light. To do this, I needed to create a "shadow reflection".
To start, I went into Maya and created a new render layer called, "beauty fast". This layer contained only my model and my key light, and I assigned a Lambert shader to the model so that it would render faster. I then went into my render settings and turned on the AOVs, P (position), and N (Normal). I planned on using the information in those AOVs to drive my shadow reflection. I rendered out a sequence and brought it into Nuke.
There, I used a Shuffle node, and isolated the P AOVs and used the Y information to drive my ground shadow values. I inverted the channels and then added a grade node to control the falloff of the reflection. Then I merged the mask into the original beauty fast image so that the mask is isolated to just my model. Then I used a color correction to control the darkness of the shadow reflection.
Additionally, I wanted to add motion blur as a way of enriching my animation. So in Maya, in my beauty fast layer, I turned on motion blur in the render settings and adjusted the Length to 0.05 so that I was very subtle because I planned on controlling the strength in Nuke. Then, I added the Motion Vector AOV and rendered out a sequence.
Then in Nuke, I used the Vector blur node to enhance the Motion.
With these elements in place, I plan on going into nuke and doing some last-minute tweaks before the final submission.