Godfather: Chinatown

This has been sitting in my unpublished posts for 2 months. I guess it would help to publish.

I did initial concepts for Godfather's 6th estate, Chinatown, back in November of last year. However, I had to pass those concepts off to a few other artists since the project straddled my trip to India and Paris. When I returned they passed me back what they'd done while I was gone and I painted the 4th levels of all the buildings and went over everyone's work to make them all look like they were painted by the same hand.

Here's the level I painted (level 4). The buildings are 95% my own paint and the background plate was done by John Brassell.

Below: Concept sketches for Chinatown. I proposed that instead of having 10 different buildings that correspond to different functions (like we always did with our expansion estates) we instead make each floor of a building or set of buildings correspond to those functions. This way, we could maintain a more realistic, cramped, New York City feel.

Below: These are the more polished sketches I passed off to be modeled in 3D right before I left the country.

Below: Color comps for possible Chinatown moods. We picked the middle left comp and they did the final estate painting based on it. As you can see, they stuck pretty close to what I left them with.

Below: This is the breakdown guide for the modeler. He needed to know which elements were separate pieces so they could be upgraded in a modular way and rendered out separately for the artists to paint over and export.

This was a very strange release for me given that I wasn't present for a month of the production. There wasn't a single bit of artwork for this expansion that wasn't touched by my hand. I went over everything in the neighborhood view as well (not pictured), which included a background plate and 4 racket buildings. I had to adjust the background plate to fit the style better and expand the view. The racket buildings needed to be adjusted to fit the background plate again too. Overall I was pleased with the results.