At this stage I've got decent enough block out of the street to come up with differing designs for townhouses to add variety to the neighborhood. As well as a bit of time in Speed Tree to figure out hose to create them and control the look of the tree. While we don't need very many plants in our short I will be making most of the by hand using MASH networks
The trees lining the street are all LOD 0 of a tree I made and pulled straight from Speed Tree. It took roughly 30 minutes to figure out the program and make this tree. I left it texture less and used the card leaf type instead of the geo leaf to save time. It was also just a test so cards worked good enough to get the general idea of the tree in the Maya scene space
In this shot I wanted to test the lighting however I didn't like seeing the glowing ball that was the lamp so its just a point light above the post cylinder. Again as its just a proof of concept test I did not feel that having the actual glass ball on the lamp was important. I left the reference model of the person in the scene to show the scale of the width of the road which may need some expanding when there are cars in the set.
This is the same render without the AI sky dome creating the city glow in the render above.
For the summer I purchased a Houdini class that will get me more familiar with the program as well as teach me how to create cloth sims as well as hair. This is a recently discussed need having come to the realization that while we are going with a stylized look interactive cloth and hair will be better for the end product. As well as keep the animation grounded just out of the uncanny valley, also the characters hair would be very hard to sculpt and make convincing.