Thoughts on Speke village

I've had a think this evening about how to do Speke village itself.  It would be far too time-consuming a job to model every last individual building in Speke, there are probably well over 1,000 houses.

I've had a quick go using generic autogen houses to see what kind of look that gave, placing them with Instant Scenery 2.  It's better than flat GenX photoscenery, but they don't look at all real and they shimmer badly.

It's some kind of realism I'm after, not just a slapdash autogen mixture, so I've come up with a compromise solution.  Looking at the buildings in Speke, there are several different types of houses, along with some schools, shops and other things.  I'm thinking I can do the 10-12 different types of house with a realistic texture, then just use the same ones over and over again.  It won't be truly realistic, but it will look a lot better than autogen, and how many people are going to notice that no3 acacia avenue doesn't have uPVC windows and the roof tiles may be not the right colour exactly when they're more concerned with staying in the circuit or climbing out from 09?

Even if I had won the lottery and had all the time in the world it just wouldn't be a good use of time to try and do everything individually.  With the housing made up of the 10-12 different models Speke will look more realistic than it does currently.  I may even do several variations of each different type, with the same model structure but different roof tile textures, so it looks like there are more different types than there really are.

The other decision  is how detailed I should make all the individual models.  The industrial parks were easy, but houses have chimneys etc.  My test model above has chimneys and overlapping eaves as well (obviously the textures aren't perfect but again this was a proof of concept model), but I'm wondering whether to keep them in or not.  The perfectionist in me says keep them, because it wil look more realistic, but the realist says with 100's of these populating Speke, there will be a performance hit with more complex models, and even more so for people with lesser specced kit.

I'd appreciate anyone else with any modelling experience giving me some advice here, because I just don't know which way to go?  Should I stick with detailed or just go with a simpler design?

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