Here I have added some grass with the use of the hair and fur modifier. its fairly simple I just created a plane to represent where the grass was to grow from and then used the modifier to apply the specifics characteristics I wanted the grass to have e.g. height, compactness, colour.

Here is the rendered image with the path and fence added around the house.

I have started to make the rest of the outside environment for the animation. i started buy making a stone/ concrete path which will go outside the house to make it look a bit more interesting. I made this buy simply making a long rectangle and using the connect tool to create extra lines and extrude the middle to form the curbs either side. the material added was a stone/concrete which worked well and applied it the same as I have described in earlier posts.

The wooden fence was created buy drawing out a rectangle with the line tool and then creating a rectangle for the individual fence panel which was placed at the side of the line which will form the perimeter of the fence. I then turned the fence post into a editable poly and shaped it to have a point at the top with the scale tool. I then used the scatter modifier to clone the other post and position them along the fence line. I then turned the original line drawn for the fence outline and used the editable spline modifier to extrude it and create the 3 support posts that run along the fence with the clone button.

Finished pool

Here is the finished rendered pool from the top view, i have also added a target spot light above to accent the waters reflective qualitys for you to see, im happy with how it turned out now just add it to the scene.

swimming pool creation for the outisde scene

Here i have modeled a pool to accompany the house which might be used for some of the scenes in which the camera zooms thru the windows to show the different era scenes. It was quite enjoyable to create as it is basically a plane which has been extruded buy -20 to give the overall shape. I simply got a stone material and added it to the plane and then used the UVW map to modifier it slightly so it look good. The water was a process of layering different maps and changing the glosiness and reflective values till it acheive a nice see thru reflective tint and applied a noise bump map to make it look like the water is waving, definatly looks alot nicer then when its still and flat.

Adding windows

I have added windows in this render and made the handrails on the decking slightly smaller as i realised they were slightly to big. To acheive the reflection in the windows a created a plane to fit inside the window frames on each window. I then set the ambient and diffuse colour to black in the materials editor and set the specular level to 275 and glossiness to 45. I then clicked on the opacity blank button and added a falloff map, fall off map type to fresnel. After that i added a ray trace map int he reflection slot and set the refraction to 80.

Rendered house unfinished

Here is the nearly finished house, im quite pleased with how it is turning out and need to add a few more items to complete the scene. The materials i added where edited in photoshop and applied as i have described in earlier tutorials using the UVW map to correctly place them on the image and bump map applied to each one individually. Thinking maybe it needs a swimming pool?