How Lazy Artists Make busy Metro Cities in blender
Cities are big, noisy, dirty, with big buildings, busy streets, heavy traffic, with lots and lots of people.
if you want to make them, you can see how much content you would need, its alot, buildings of different styles, animated people, animated traffic, a vibrant dynamic sky, street props, roads and more.
this video is a collection of tools, generators and addons that can help you create a bustling metropolis in a matter of minutes instead of days or years if you are working alone, all inside blender, this
1 Buildify 1.0
cities need building, detailed buildings, and buildify a free blender generator based on geometry nodes can provide that, you can create your own buildings one by one or use its blender OSM support feature to pull entire city blocks from google maps and turn them into buildings, these city blocks can use the mesh data from google or sample from buildings in your collection to match any aesthetic you are looking for.
2 Garbage Scatter
clean cities are rare, even the cleanest of cities in the world will have some trash on the street, if you want to scatter trash on your street, garbage scatter addon comes with a variety of trash to choose from and its scattering features are going to help you scatter the trash where needed in an easy way
3 Procedural Alleys
this video is about how a lazy but productive person would go about making a busy city and a truly lazy person would not need to generate an entire city when all they want is a corridor or alley or street, procedural alleys is that addon that targets people who want a quick way to make a full street filled with traffic, people, street signs, cars and everything in one go, you also get shops, posters, neon lights, traffic lights and animated crowds all in one package and its all procedural making sure every alley is always different.
4 procedural crowds
while procedural alleys can populate streets with animated crowds of people, they are not free to move around the city, for that you will need something more powerful, and that is procedural crowds, its a dedicated crowd generator, that gives you full control of your crowds, how they move, how they interact, object avoidance, and a wide range of characters for a diverse massive crowd.
5 Traffiq library
you have, crowds, you have buildings, now you need traffic for a complete city, its not enough to just damp cars in your city, they need to move, you need a way to control all the cars in your city, animate them and have them behave in a convincing way. traffic is the addon to help you with that, there library is packed with a wide range of cars, all fully rigged with detailed interiors, you also get over 250 traffic signs and street items and more.
6 Wparallax Free Kpack
you have cars, you crowds, you have buildings, but the buildings are just outside shells with no interior details, most generators dont create interiors mostly because its not necessary and it takes up alot of resources, each building would be millions of polygons. So a lite and efficient solution is parallax shaders, which can render full interiors on a single plane, and this free parallax addon can do that, it comes with a few shop shaders, room shaders and more, you just place the plane inside a window or door and it will look like the interior of that place.
7 Hira Building Generator
while parallax shaders a good way to generate interiors, the illusion works only if the camera is not too close, but if you want buildings with interiors you can move the camera into take a look at hira building generator.
this powerful generator does not just make detailed buildings but you can also add interiors to them as well, and another great feature of this, is you can shape the buildings as you want with a simple lowpoly mesh that you edit and the generator converts to a detailed building with an optional interior.
8 Cyberscape Pro
sofar we have been looking at urban city generators, if you want to create a futuristic city, you will need something totally different, you can still use traffiq for the cars, or procedural crowds for the crowds am sure future people still look like today people, but the buildings totally change, and for that let me introduce to you Cyberscape pro.
it is is a procedural futuristic city generator powered by Geometry Nodes and it shines at night, it has a cyberpunk feeling and really feels complete. cyberscape creates cities that feel like cities with are purpose, with cooperate office building and mega towers.
9 Procedural Medieval Castle Generator
cities don’t have to be futuristic or urban, you can go back in time and generate cities around castles using this medieval castle generator.
the generator can create alot of variation in the castle size, height and features with just a few parameters, it also generates the ground and hills the castles seat on.
10 Road Path Creator
this Road path generator does not necessary create buildings or cities, but i noticed sometimes the streets generated by these generators do not have the level of detail you may want, so i included this road path generator that comes with more close up detail for roads and streets so when it comes to close up shots of your city, you have something to rely on.
11 Medieval City 3d Asset Pack
cities come in all types and shapes, if you need a stylized city, create it using this 3d medieval city asset pack, the pack comes with over 280 low poly assets, and its super light using just 4 materials for everything, making it easy to run on any machine or in case you want to export it to a game engine.
the models a properly uv mapped and example cities are included.
12 Quick Anime City Ver2.1
speaking of stylized cities, this generator produces anime cities in just seconds, the buildings are quite detailed and come in many types, they use a shader that really makes the city truly have that anime feel to it.
13 Cyberpunk City Skyscraper Large
if you want a hollywood look, but your budget does not allow it, this city generator can help, the building are quite detail and the results speak for them selves.
this package, contains a fully texture soviet city, that you can play around with and change abit so that you don’t start your city from scratch.
13 Hira City Block Generator
if what you want is a dense skyline, then hira city block generator is what you should get, it can create cities from a grid or a terrain mesh.
In addition to automatic creation of buildings and city blocks, the generator outputs rough shapes of city blocks and buildings, which can then be mesh edited manually, and building materials and details can be input in the generator to mesh object after outputting rough shapes.
14 Next Building Generator
still on stylized cities, this generator will take you centuries back into Egypt, imersing your audience into that time period, with well detailed egyptain style buildings, sculptures and more.
the assets used are highly detailed so they come with a high polycount, but optimization tools are also available in the addon, to make it easy for you to render them.
15 Abandoned City Generator
you cant just make a bustling city in 3d and call it a success, you have to visualize how it would look abandoned and decaying, for that let me introduce to you this free abandoned city generator, it has everything you would need to achieve a post apocalypse city all inside blender, from damaged buildings, vegetation overgrowth, dangling wires and more.
16 Pure-Sky Pro
you are almost done, but you need one more thing, a dynamic realistic sky, with clouds atmosphere, and and more, the pure sky pro addon can do all and additionally can generate any type of lens flare you need for added realism.
you can create a timelapse of your skyline thanks to its clouds animation system, it also supports exponential height fog which creates amazing god rays.
