D&ad; Maya cityscape

The sky is not ideal, especially as I am trying to create a sort of dystopian style scene. It needs to be dark and dingy, by rotating the physical sun you can change the time of day by the position of the sun in the sky. I want a sun set style so I rotate the sun to nearly the same angle as the z axis. By adding a an image of clouds to the haze factor in physical sky and using the multiply and divide utility I was able to create this dark moody looking sky.

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.