Great if you just want to slap one material on an object and move a 3D After Effects camera around it, but not great if you want assign different materials to different parts of the 3D object, or want to animate individual parts separately. Simple enough, right? That'll only bring the Maya object into Element 3D as one big object with the same texture. To do this, you first need to export the Maya scene as an OBJ model.
If you are working with Element 3D V2 in After Effects for your 3D workflow, you might want to bring in a 3D object built in Maya.
