Neighborhood Street/Landscaping Techniques?

[MegaPixel]

Hello all.

 

I'm planning out a rather large Community Exterior Animation which requires most of the subdivision to be modeled up. I took a stab at one approach to creating the landscaping by using a combination of lofted curb profiles and extruded street/sidewalk and grass profiles (Reference the attached image). I'm finding that the lofted geometry around the arcs doesn't match up with the extruded geometry creating ugly gaps between my curbing and grass parkways. I was hoping for some tips.

 

Also, I'd like some suggestions on how to go about displacing my grass landscaping without tesselating the entire object to push and pull vert.s and throwing poly's through the roof. For the most part, I can leave alot of the grass flat but I have areas where Burms will border the community entrance and Ponds will need to slope down into a basin. I need to define certain areas of the grass object and need to know the best - effeciant way to do it. I've tried Shapemerging my Burm and Lake objects and then tesselating the islotaed areas but they look ugly. I need Quads instead of triangles to get good push/pull results.

 

How about a third question while I'm at it... For some reason, I'm getting Aliasing around the edges of where two objects intersect or go threw each other - for instance: When I add a house to the scene, and lower it into the grass object until it sits about at the right height. There is a kind of ugly aliasing that occurs where the thwo objects intersect - aswell as all of the objects that I use to do this. Thoughts?

 

Thanks Guys. I know this is alot for one post but I'm sure I'll get some good answers. Thankyou - MegaPixel