Re: 3D compositing, Shake, Combustion or After Effects?

Just a quick chime in, am busy at work (man i need to find time to go through these threads ;-).

In regards to what compositing systems work best with 3d (as in actually compositing in a 3d environment, allowing you to do camera projection onto basic geometry (be it curved planes or basic meshes), light, etc), hands down my pick would be Nuke (...now if I could only win the lottery to get a personal copy), ...second, which isn't noted here is Fusion (which also has the ability to generate particles in 3d) and from all accounts is very useable in the 3d compositing realm (again a true 3d environment).

Notes on the other apps mentioned.

Combustion - great paint, roto and color correction tools, but it has 2.5d planar compositing, not really different to the two apps below at a fundamental level

Shake - been an industry staple for donkeys years, the keylight/primatte combo kicks butt for keying, extremely powerful and if you do multipass 3d renders there are a number of tutorials on how to relight using these passes (and also macros to relight using normal map renders). Go to fxshare to find out more.
Something I hasten to add is you can do the above multipass tricks in any compositing application and techniques you should learn (why re-render a slow 3d scene when you can tweak things like material colours and basic lighting in 2d interactively and quickly render it off).

In the true 3d comping sense it falls down as it is really just multiplane 2.5d and is fine if you do basic things with it (i.e. bring in a matchmove camera and use some planes to do set extensions), ...but can get buggy if you make things too complex.

After Effects - lacking in the roto and paint dept, has great tracker in Mocha, integrates closely with C4D but likewise works with maya pretty well. Cs4 has made some progress in 3d land, you can now use 3d geometry in your scenes, ...the BIG gotcha is that you need Photoshop to convert your objects to its proprietry 3d scene format, ...and the render quality is not exactly Mental Ray/VRay/Renderman/etc

Motion - okay if you're an editor wanting to rustle something quick up but like chinese water torture if you want to get down and dirty with the tweakage (for serious mograph I'd recommend After Effects, Combustion or Fusion over it, ...and for compositing it would come last on my list)

Hope that helps.

andrew