Creating Cityscapes in Maya

Learn to design, model, and render a detailed cityscape with Illustrator and Maya.

Follow along with Adam Crespi as he designs, models, and renders a detailed cityscape with Maya. After gathering reference materials, Adam designs the basic structure and components of the city in Adobe Illustrator, generating reusable symbols to represent trees, lights, and buildings. With the plan in hand, Adam dives into Maya, creating proxy objects as he lays out the city to scale. Each element is then set up as a reference object and duplicated throughout the scene, using containers and mental ray Proxy objects. The final chapter shows you how to add a matte-painting background to your scene and check the composite in Nuke. Adam also includes a bonus movie featuring a real-world example project: a simulation of a crane moving on a studio backlot.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know before watching this course
• Using the exercise files

1. Conceptualizing the City: Establishing Boundaries

• Studying existing city conditions
• Establishing visually permeable boundaries
• Evolving the city's history and influences
• Evolution, revolution, and revolt: Overlaying construction
• Designing transportation modes

2. Planning the City

• Creating street-design elements in Adobe Illustrator
• Drawing building volumes for layout
• Creating tree symbols
• Adding lighting to streetlight symbols
• Laying out the city grid and buildings

3. Creating White-Box Elements

• Creating a reference structure
• Modeling street modules
• Blocking out building volumes
• Mocking up tree volumes
• Modeling street fixtures

4. Using Referenced Modules to Block Out the City

• Creating referenced objects
• Updating and changing references
• Containerizing assets for referencing
• Referencing assets in a scene
• Creating a mental ray proxy for trees

5. Ending the Views: Creating Skies and Mattes

• Establishing matte-painting confines
• Setting up the layer markers for compositing
• Exporting layer markers for compositing
• Implementation case study: Digital backlot crane shot

Conclusion

• Next steps