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 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.
Here’s how it works in Blender:
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!
…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.