Lost Weekend...
Added 2022-01-24 02:51:27 +0000 UTCWell, not really - it was actually very productive. But some time Friday I started putting together the neighborhood and home where TAG's MC and his girlfriend Nina live. There are a few scenes (most of them coming up very soon) that take place there, so it was the right time to do it. Holy crap did this take a lot of work. I put in 3-4 hours Friday, 9-10 hours Saturday and 10-11 hours today on it. It had to work well for night scenes, look reasonably like a Los Angeles area suburb, and be able to accommodate their house. I started with a nice "neighborhood" product that I thought would make things easy. Ha!
The houses had no built in lighting, and when you look at a street at night, of course you'll see lights in the windows, porch lights on, etc. Plus of course LA has a lot of palm trees. I bought some palm tree products, altered the exterior house textures as much as I could to make them more "LA", and found a full (interior and exterior) house product that would fit on one of the lots and be reasonably close to the kind of place they would own (it's actually a bit too modern and upscale for them, but it's the closest I could find). The lighting was the hardest, most time-consuming thing. Except for MC & Nina's house, all the houses are just empty shells, so I figured I'd just stick a crazy bright light inside each house and detached garage, alter all the windows, door glass and window blinds so they could pass light, add some exterior porch lights and away we go... NOT so fast! All the neighborhood houses had crazy light leaks, so light streamed out of all the building seams, under doors and under the roofs - so at night they looked like shacks ready to be condemned by the county! So I had to fashion custom light-blocking shapes to go inside each house and its garage! Huge amount of time. Plus about a hundred thousand other details, lol.
In any case, except for some window treatments for MC & Nina's house, it's all ready to go, with a sky and surrounded by typical Southern CA hills! Hope you like it!
