Render layers, is one very powerful feature of Maya. You might ask why?

In this tutorial we will be using a finished model. You can download it zipped if you know how to extract it or the uncompressed one.

1. Zipped

 http://www.tutorialscentral.com/images/stories/maya/Render_Layers/cityscape%20model.zip

2.Uncompressed 

 http://www.tutorialscentral.com/images/stories/maya/Render_Layers/cityscape.obj

Imagine this, you are doing shot for the film, for example cyber cityscape. And you use many lights, glows, fog, crafts … And of course you turn on some form of GI or ambient occlusion. And when you press render it takes hours to render, but it looks really great. And then your director come and he looks at render and says “Wow that is really great “, and you are happy since you didn’t slept for three days in order to finish it, but then he says “… but I don’t like the color of that fog, make it little brighter!” And you change it, but then he have to wait hours, for new render. And you are very lucky if you have to change only that one thing. But in most cases he will ask you to change million things. He doesn’t have time for you to render frame again and again. So, after a while you will be fired!

But, if you are smart, you will separate your scene in many layers, so when he come, and ask “change the color of that craft there, change the color of the sky…”, you will just change one slider in compositing program, and the result will come almost instantly. Your director will love you, and you will get few hours to sleep.

So I used Maya and Shake to build this cityscape scene. It’s very simple, I didn’t have time to create complex model.

So as starting point I used this

Created one directional light (sun), that casts depth map shadows with 2k resolution.

Also I created four directional lights from different sides to create blue illusion of sky illumination.

When rendered image looks like this. You can notice that those four lights make scene look flat. Later I’ll use ambient occlusion pass to make that small details more visible.

I used bliin materials for some buildings.

I assigned texture to it. You can notice how odd it looks. We need to fix UV’s.

Select all faces.

And then use cylindrical projection to project texture from cylinder around object. Use manipulators to fit cylinder to your object.

I also added bump using same texture, and used same texture for specular color.

Select all faces that look to the sky. Use planar projection to project texture to them.

I also created few more materials.