Now you will need to zoom into the streets between your quads and move them all together.


When you get in closer you will note the edges of each quad have a stair step pattern to them. These "steps" mate together and form a seamless image.


After you have butted your quads together, you want to merge all of your layers into one for our final output.


You will also note that we are now using less than our image size of 8100 x 8100. You always want to keep your image square and a power of 2x. So, you can crop the image size down to 6k (6144 x 6144). I find it easier to start large and then crop it down later. Save the image as a TIFF file format.


The output file will be fairly large. This one should be about 215 MB which is average for a 6k, RGB16-bit TIFF file.

OK, you are finally at the point where you are ready to launch Maya and start displacing. Open Maya and create a NURBS plane with these settings:

• * scaleX = 614.4
• * scaleY = 614.4
• * scaleZ = 614.4
• * patchesU = 25
• * patchesV = 25
• * degree = Cubic

This is why we need to make sure the Photoshop image we are using for displacement remains square.

You will notice that we scaled the flat NURBS plane in all 3 axis. (X, Y, and Z) The reason for this is because Maya calculates displacement as if it were a volume. If you have a flat plane and you leave it's scaleY value at 1, it will not displace properly because it only has 1 unit of volume to work with. You need to scale your plane in Y to a value at least that of your target displacement. Since we do not know that number yet, I just scale all 3 values the same amount. The reason for 614.4 is because I prefer to work in 1/10th scale. This eliminates all the potential problems Maya has when dealing with larger scaled scenes. So, since our TIFF image is 6k (6144 x 6144) it's a straight conversion to 614.4 x 614.4. The patches 25 and cubic are going to come into play when we convert the displacement to polygons later.

With your plane selected use the pull down: "Window > Rendering Editors > mental ray > Approximation Editor..."


In the Approximation Editor you want to click the [Create] button next to "Displace Approx."


Next click the [Edit] button and change the Presets to Fine View High Quality.


This is just a default preset for the Displacement Approximation and works well for our purposes.

Next:

• * Create a new Lambert shader and click the "Output Connection" button located at the top of the Attribute Editor.

• * Then click the map button next to "Displacement Mat."

• * Then click the "File" button in the Create Render Node window.

• * Click the file tab and then map our TIFF image to the "Image Name" field.