At this moment of the story, 2 planes are about to collide over New Yok City at night. My task was to provide two «bird views» of the city, as the editing showed both planes points of views. Although most of the matte paintings were covered with FX clouds and CG planes, I found stills of the final shots where we can see the backgrounds relatively well (pics A and B). To create them, I used a big 3D asset of New York that I textured in Maya with simple black and white patterns of windows (I usually call it the «wallpaper» method). It was an efficient way to get consistent masks of windows in terms of scale and perspective. I rendered several passes of these wallpapers, mixed them in Photoshop to get enough variations. Then I just had to reveal some indoors textures through it to obtain a convincing effect of buildings at night. I also mixed some sophisticated lighting passes from MPC lead environment Alex Clark to improve realism, as well as various aerial pictures of the city to get the final result.