D&ad; Maya cityscape

Here's how I went about creating a 3D cityscape for the first scene of our black holes animation;
First we start with a single street layout taken from the paint effects tool (texture not on my PC.) I applied a physical sun and sky taken from the render settings of mental ray under environment. You will need a background for your cityscape, I started drawing one but figured this would be too time costly so I took a panoramic photo of the Chicago skyline found online at http://www.roadtripamerica.net/skylines/chicago/cold_morning.html. After cutting out the sky and foreground in Photoshop and applying an alpha channel to the visible area save it in a targa format. Create a polyplane and UV map it. Take the UV map into Photoshop and scale the image to fit the UV map. Open the hypershade panel in Maya and apply the 2d texture to a surface shader. Assign the texture to your polyplane, voila! You now should have a city background with a 3D street in the middle and physical sun and sky.