Behind the Scenes: Exteriors

This month in Behind the Scenes, we talk about exterior locations. While most of Now & Then's interiors needed to be built piece-by-piece, I found it necessary to fashion exterior sets from already-existing mods. Though, often, not without a lot of tweaking. 

First up: the Walters' neighborhood. As with most outside locations, I took an already-existing map (named Neighbourhood) and tweaked it to fit my needs. On the left below is the original map, rife with some extremely low-res trees. To fill in the background and to cover up the blurry foliage, I dropped in various tree and bush modded items (thanks to Lykanz and Saint1228 for the content). 

Add on a backdrop of the surrounding city, limit the camera angles (you don't want to see the other direction) and viola! One instant suburban neighborhood. 

For Jack's and Carol's apartment complex, I had to do a little extra. I actually had to layer two separate maps to produce a convincing cityscape. The base is Ram-o-Ram's Residential Park set on top of another, named Sunset Bridgedown. Again, I placed a number of Lykanz's trees and bushes to fill in the space between the areas and to hide some of the uglier seams. You can see the progression below. 

Left: Base Residential Park. Middle: Dropped and re-arranged on the second map (a low-res city map). Right: The final with trees and shrubbery added.

In addition to the surrounding scenery, I found myself needing to add more detailed props and furnishing to connect the balcony to the already-existing living room location. To keep up this illusion, I inserted in a small section of that location against the glass balcony doors. Doing this allowed for shots both pointed into and out of the apartment. 

If you have anything you'd like to learn about, development-wise, feel free to drop a suggestion in the comments.

And thanks for your patronage!

- Kinderfeld