Beginning Lighting Tests

Into a new file I've brought in some of the houses after their transformation and set up a mia_material_x shader for some of them and gamma corrected their textures. For demonstration purposes I also found an image of a sky online and gamma corrected it in photoshop to be brought into Maya as an image plane so the background isn't blank. When we have the actual painted background this method is also possible though applying it in comp is also an option. I set up a physical sun and sky and deleted the lens shader and changed the render settings to a linear workflow. The first render is with a brighter directional (as the sun) and the second render is with a slightly teal sky (Ruby-May's colour script seems to indicate a teal sky at some point). Again this was for demonstration purposes. The second render also has an ambient light with a slighlty warm salmon colour and the directional light has had its intensity greatly reduced. These are just the beginnings of the process and obviously the more overcast grey version needs to be started too. There has been no global illumination or changes to the basic render settings at this stage.
I'm happy that at these initial stages the textures are coming across so vibrantly.

I'm not sure how we're placing the fences and such yet especially since each house is a different size and shape but for now I have just made sure they don't intersect. The ground will be raised up in areas and textures applied for the road, pavement, grass, fences etc. I will wait until the ground shape is finalized before uving it fully to apply my textures. For the grass I will use a simple seamless texture that resembles grass and possibly some planes dotted here and there with the texture of raised grass on it with an alpha applied. Another possibility is the basic grass texture with some small Maya plants from the visor. 

Here's a quick version with global illumination and raytracing shadows enabled and the sun set at a slighlty more obtuse angle. I think I prefer the earlier renders. The global illumination doesn't have much effect in itself yet so I'll have to really look into whether enough photons are being emitted and how far they're travelling.