Last week I talked about creating the street scenes for the film by modeling some of the key buildings by hand. However, doing that for an entire neighborhood wasn’t going to work.
I still needed to create dozens of other buildings, and if the ones I’ve bought don’t fit the character of the real Chicago Chinatown, what do I do? I have to find a way to quickly create lots of them. The answer came in the form of Blender’s “Geometry Nodes” which with the help of this incredible tutorial series by KammerBild, showed me how to create “procedural buildings”:
I can’t recommend this tutorial enough to you Blender heads out there!
I used this technique to create all the buildings for the skyline in Restless Sleep, and repurposed it for Chinatown using elements from the various models in my asset library.
Basically, the building (left) is created using a visual program (center) and controlled using the properties in the viewer on the lower right. Once the program was set up in Geometry Nodes, I don’t have to mess with it anymore. I then can feed new building models into it to create new buildings of any size and customize them with different sets of doors and windows, based on the model sources.
The models can look like anything, so long as they fit into a cube. In this case, I used pieces of a building model I purchased from DAZ3D by an artist called StoneMason. It felt a little like playing with LEGOs!
This building… …is made from these parts!
Over about a week, I adapted about a dozen building models like this to work with this so I could populate the entire Chinatown neighborhood. Then all I needed to add was some signs—both customized and stock—to give the street a little more character. A number of these signs were made in Photoshop based on some Creative Commons photos of Chinatown from about 15 years ago, which the era I knew the neighborhood from. It’s changed quite a bit since I moved away, but I wanted to preserve the character of the Chicago I once knew and loved.
While these buildings aren’t an exact match to the real ones in Chicago’s Chinatown, they definitely do the job. If I had infinite amounts of time or budget to hire a team of skilled BG artists, maybe we could get closer, but I’m pretty happy with the results I’ve been able to achieve in a short period of time using this method.
One of the most intimidating parts of tackling Paradigm Shift has always been the urban environments. When I first started to draw the comic, it was easily the thing that I was scared of doing most, which is ironic considering that the highly detailed drawings of Chicago neighborhoods became one of the things I’m most known for. The only reason that was possible was I had to take that fear of drawing those shots head on. I drew some test cityscapes, and started with them on page one, and by the time I’d done a few, they weren’t so scary anymore.
Original Chinatown opening shot from 1999.Test render of the new Chinatown street set in 2024Ref photo from 1999Pool hall exterior in the comic.Pool hall test render.
Fast forward 25 years, and the same problem hit when trying to bring Paradigm Shift to animation—these bloody cityscapes! Now, video games have been tackling this problem for decades now—managing the huge amount of assets that will be required to make a believable city street: buildings, cars, people, signs, etc. Modeling every little detail by hand the way I drew every line for the comic is a daunting proposition, and not exactly the best use of my time today.
The Chinatown street set in Blender.
Thankfully, I don’t have to because there are so many talented artists out there in the 3D world already who have made their work available for a very reasonable price. I’ve spent the last couple of year accumulating assets through DAZ3D’s store with an eye towards making Paradigm Shift: Chinatown—buildings, cars, weapons, sets, and various asian-themed environments. Now I can finally put them to good use! However, I’m not deploying them as-is, but rather I use them like LEGOs, like I did with the sets I got as a kid. I disassemble them and use them for parts. In short—I kit bash. This way, I can save my modeling time to create the very specific buildings and props I need to make Chinatown look like the neighborhood I knew back during my time in Chicago. Buildings like the Pui Tak Center:
If you already have a Kickstarter account, hit the “Notify Me” button and you won’t miss it!
What should you expect?
Since we’re funding a movie this time, it’s going to look a little different than the campaign from 2019.
The base level offers a digital download of the film, an invitation to the premiere (both live and livestream), and shout-outs in the credits.
The higher tiers will include additional digital goodies and physical swag like movie posters and t-shirts.
And at the top levels we’re offering things like original artwork and a chance to appear the in the film!
We’d love to have your help!
Are you willing to post about the launch to your social media feed on the big dayto boost the campaign? Email me, and I’ll send you everything you’ll need to post!
