City and Lights

Not like other scenes, the city scene will be the only scene has both 2d and 3d sequence. So Loanne drew outline of the city first and gave it to me so that i can work on 3d effects and editing on After Effect.

While she was drawing the city, I was playing around with making neon sign in maya.
I found the tutorial on youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eucvqSzRpTA
I reckon this is really easy because i can make it only using hypershade, no other dynamics, particles and mental ray. Also it can be used as glow effect or others.
I will use this effect to the lights around the e4 building.

Below picture is the first example I played around with.

I made lights around the e4 building, but it doesn't look well enough as I though with the white backgrounded buildings. What I expected was it would look shiny and glowy in the night. However, the glowness was blended into the white background and doesn't look matched with 2d as well.

So we discussed how we can make it look good and found there is "toon" menu at rendering menu set. It gives much more tidiness and look of 3d and 2d at the same time. I squashed the spheres so that can look more 2d-ish and rendered with toon.

For the compositing the city, I broke down loanne's 2d city to 3 parts - front, middle and back sections and put them as 3d layers. To give some sense of depth of field, I added gaussian blur to back and front section.

After add the lights and clouds.