iCity 1.5 generates procedural 3D cities inside Blender
Originally posted on 21 May 2024. Scroll down for news of the iCity 1.5 update.
Architecture student and tools developer Hothifa Smair has released iCity, his promising procedural city-generation add-on for Blender.
The Geometry Nodes-based tool, which is aimed at both entertainment artists and architectural visualization, lets users draw out road networks that iCity automatically populates with 3D buildings, generated using a library of readymade assets.
Set down the outlines of city blocks and have iCity populate them with 3D buildings
iCity lets users generate cities – or at least, sets of city blocks – by extruding the edges of existing blocks, or drawing out road networks using the Procedural Road tool.
The software then automatically populates each new block with procedural buildings.
Users can change the city layout by moving the roads directly in the viewport, with iCity automatically regenerating the buildings to match the new road network.
The look of the roads and the buildings can be customized using a set of parametric controls to change major properties like overall dimensions and storey count.
It is also possible to replace the buildings in a city block with a park, again generated procedurally.
Generates roads and 3D buildings from an accompanying library of assets
iCity comes with 20 procedural buildings, ranging from skyscrapers to smaller apartment blocks, with users able to set up their own custom presets.
The streets can be dressed using readymade 3D assets including trees, cars and street lights, and with procedural details like fallen leaves, litter or puddles.
A proxy mode makes it possible to toggle to untextured low-resolution geometry to improve interactive performance when working on complex assets.
The online documentation on the product website is still fairly bare-bones, but you can see the workflow in the video above.
Updated 23 June 2025: Hothifa Smair has released iCity 1.5.
The update extends iCity’s road-generation system, making it possible to convert roads into larger highways, and adds support for custom lane markings.
There are also new tools for generating and editing terrain directly within iCity.
Export assets in parallel in the background
In addition, the export system has been updated to run in the background, making it possible to carry on working on the active .blend file, and now supports multiple parallel exports.
It is also now possible to convert instances to conventional meshes before export.
iCity 1.1 to 1.4: new city block types, and new export formats
Previous updates since the original release have also added new city block types, including parking lots, green areas, and a custom ’empty block’ option.
It is also now possible to change the scale units that iCity uses by default, making it possible to use a range of real-world units.
Export formats supported by the plugin include FBX, glTF/GLB and USD.
Price and system requirements
iCity 1.5 is compatible with Blender 4.4+. Individual licenses now cost $78, up $3 since the original release; studio licenses start at $148.
Read more about iCity on the add-on’s Blender Market page
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