How to Create a City

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Discover how to create a realistic city in blender without using scripts!

Length:
63 minutes
Software:
Blender 2.62
Difficulty:
Advanced
Rate:
VN:F [1.9.17_1161]
Rating: 4.8/5 (238 votes cast)

In this tutorial you will discover how to:

  • Model a lowpoly building
  • Create a city using only particles
  • Create a textured road with intersections

Cities aren’t exactly the easiest of scenes to create. You’ve got buildings, cars, lamp posts and not to mention those roads! Oh man.

Not surprisingly most artists use scripts to get the job done. However in my personal experience, scripts for blender currently do not produce a high enough quality of results.

So in this tutorial I’ll show you few simple tricks to make creating a city easier.

Finished Result

Download the Finished .blend

Resources:

At a Glance

Screenshots from the video:

Further Inspiration

Not sure where to go with this tutorial? Check out the links below for further city inspiration:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Now create the city of your dreams ;)

How to Create a City, 4.8 out of 5 based on 238 ratings

About Andrew Price

User of Blender for 9+ years. I've written tutorials for 3d World Magazine and spoken at three Blender conferences. My goal is to help artists get employed in the industry by making training accessible and easy to understand. I'm an Aussie and I live in South Korea ;)
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  • Victor

    Andrew, muy buen tutorial, solo que no entiendo el ingles,¿hay alguna manera de hacerlos en español?, de todos modos son muy buenos y he aprendido mucho gracias.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=713481346 Wyatt Johnson

    Thank you so much Andrew! My course in university at the University of Alberta thanks to your help was able to produce this for our final course project!

    http://youtu.be/_VRNRwxayiU

    Thank you so much!

  • Maika

    Is it possible to convert the city to a mesh and add extra parts to specific buildings or can i do that while its still particles? will converting it to mesh affect the render times?

  • Simpson

    Great tutorial :) But I have this one problem. When I use the particle system on the plane the buildings end up in the center of the pane and not sitting on the top of it. Need help.

    • Simpson

      *plane

      • cotton eyed joe

        The origin point of your building needs to be at the point where they’d be touching the ground.

  • Ado xian

    Andrew, how can you get the buildings bigger? I’m finding it hard to film INSIDE the city with how small everything is… The camera’s HUGE! D:

  • John

    Hi. I am trying to enable GPU rendering under cycles as it instructs in the tutorial but I cannot get it to work.

    I am using Blender 2.66 and my operating system is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

    My graphics card is a Geforce 440/PCIe/SSE2.

    I go to user preferences > system > compute device, but I do not have the options that are shown in the tutorial.

    I have just one button (‘none’) and the only option in the drop down menu is ‘CPU’

    Any advice that can be given would be gratefully appreciated.

    Many Thanks

  • Gpo23

    Hello :)

    For the creation of the streets, would it be possible to use a boolean modifier (Difference option) based on the building plane ? and then scale it ? I’ve tried but Blender crashes…

    btw thanks a lot for your amazing work !

    • swaschan

      Technically, no. The origin would screw things up.

  • Steven

    Hey Andrew, Here’s a clip I made involving your city tutorial, thoughts?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CDQ_CtDiP0

    • patrick

      hey canyou pass your facebook for contact ? im interested in make a partnership with you to make my project …i’m brasilian and i need members for my blender group …. Reply Me if you want to join us …sorry for my bad english ! :)

  • ApersonBeing

    Great Tutorial!
    I’m having an issue though. When I render out a scene I am getting buildings show up where there are none in my viewport. My buildings group is on a different, excluded layer and my particle emitter has been baked. I do not understand where these rogue buildings are coming from. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. This is driving me crazy! Thanks.

  • sjesman

    Very impressive. Nice work.

    I have question though. While exporting the scene to .obj file, things don’t scale right.Should I globally fix scaling before export? ( I have to learn a lot about Blender)

    You can see yourself – export the scene to .obj file and import in the fresh started blender session.

    Best regards,

    Stan

  • shk

    if not much sir, can you please make a pdf version of the tutorial?
    gladly appreciate it sir :D

  • josh

    is there any tutorials on render to texture?

  • Luca

    Great tutorial Andrew!
    I am having a problem with my city however. When I apply my particle system after creating my “Buildings” group, the buildings emit from their center rather than their bottoms. This ends up making the buildings get cut in half by their plane. Help Please! :D

    • Olguern

      Your origine point are not in the battum of your basement I think
      Bye

  • Tamás Márton

    Awesome tutorial! I laughed a lot at the end, when you presented the car accident… :D

  • Arczer

    Whenever I try to export a city from blender to unity3d it get messed up. The roads/cars etc. are all very small and the actual building are like in the video tutorial at 0:27:18, and are big on top of the roads/cars… any way to fix this?
    Thanks

    • Cylon_Toast

      I work with unity all the time. Check your FBX exporter settings and make sure your scale factor is on 1 not .01 also you can adjust the FBX import in unity when you click on object in the inspector.

  • Matthew

    Is it me, Andrew, or do you always get inspiration from Inception? :)

  • J. Young

    Andrew, I wanted to thank you for your hard work on these tutorials. I have been following along in silence and keeping to myself for a while, but after watching this tutorial, I had to leave 3 comments

    1) I realize I need to watch all of your videos (and every other tutorial video I can find) as you have an amusing habit of solving a problem I have run into that has very little to do with the subject of a given tutorial just off the cuff.

    2) I love your little stories you tell, and after listening to your story about getting lost in California, I had to share that with my mother. She would have called the police after I didn’t answer my cell phone or the phone where I was staying, though.

    3) I just finished a test render using this method to generate a functional QR code (square bar code thing for those not familiar). It’s going to take some work to make it pretty, but I have proof of concept, and I thought that was worth sharing.

    In closing, thanks a million for your hard work, and for giving a novice like me hope!

  • Blanco111
  • Kartikey

    Hi, i have a problem with the building textures, when i finished modeling one building i duplicated it and made some different ones from that, now when i want to change the material on any one of them it changes on all, for example i remove the side material on one building but all the buildings get it removed. Not sure what to do here.

    Also ,when i use particle system all of my buildings do not get the same level.I mean some of them come downwards of the plane.Can u please help?

    • cylon_toast

      on the materials on the duplicate building you will see a number next to where you put your name… click on that number. it means “shared files” so if you duped that building three times the third one would have the number 3. any changes you make to any of the three would affect the other two unless you click the number.

  • Blanco111

    I learned a lot from this tutorial. As a beginner, there were many things I did for the first time. A lot of errors. A lot of things I would have done to improve the scene if I had the skills. After several weeks and countless hours, it’s finally done! Here it is:

    http://youtu.be/_nBSdD5pxQ0

    • http://www.gavinbain.com Gavin

      Do you have duplicate vertices on that cube?

  • http://gavin-bain.blogspot.co.uk/ Gavin

    I just came back from vacation in New York, I remembered seeing this tutorial earlier in the year and I was keen to use it as the basis for a city scene while my images of New York were still fresh in my head.

    This was great fun to do, worth adding animated cars following paths too – I’ve not played with toy cars for many years, I had forgotten how much fun it can be.

    My results at: http://gavin-bain.blogspot.co.uk/

    Thanks for the tutorial Andrew.

    (Jaffe – not come across that problem, sorry. As long as I have all the seams isolating areas, each area unwraps as seperate islands for me).

  • Jaffe

    I am having the dumbest issue – almost every time I go to “Mark Seam” I get the red lines I am supposed to but when I unwrap I usually get at least one Vertices that is still connected – I have tried this with just a plane box with top and bottom faces removed and I still get at least one side that won’t disconnect. I cannot for the life of me see the reason this is happening. Thoughts?

    • Jaffe

      Still having this issue – it is so vexing – have searched the web for an answer and no one seems to have this same issue – anyone out there ever had this problem?

      • Dave

        I had this problem, too. What I did was in face select mode, select a side of the building in the 3D editor (left pane of blender), and in the UV/Image Editor (right pane), select and move the corresponding side to a new position. Didn’t have to be too far away. I did this for those sides having the problem.

        Not sure if this is a bug or a feature, as I’m not familiar enough with blender to know.

        HTH

  • twister

    At the right side of the video tutorial there is an info panel. Please take a look at “Difficulty” level.

  • http://pissedoff pissed

    Should actually tell people that you are going to waste your time doing this unless you are already an expert as each step isn’t explained and you have to google the how to to achieve each step

    • cylon_toast

      Perhaps you should familiarize yourself with basic blender techniques before trying to follow video tutorial. CGcookie.com/blender has a wonderful basic intro to blendering and only $10 u.s. a month. Andrew doesn’t do anything crazy on how he models the basics since he doesn’t have time to show the “expert” way on a “free” tutorial. I know I’m a couple months late posting to this but for everyone else who tries this and gets frustrated, you are not alone. It takes time =)

  • LuceamLuceo

    Amazing tut, was great fun to work through it. Please see my finished work here:

    http://ioriasabra.deviantart.com/#/d54tet7

  • Margaret Toigo

    This was great fun! And I now have a much better understanding of UV mapping and nodes, as well as the bullet points above.

    Here’s my result:

    http://tinyurl.com/7frd9pu

    • Dave

      Looks awesome!

  • henry

    pls help me, i cant render the textures? whats rong?.. did it twies..

  • Neil

    Why do my UV islands stick together? How come they aren’t separate like yours?

  • Rohin

    Andrew, another awesome tutorial as usual.

    I was able to follow it just fine and get a great model. Only problem is, even after 300 samples, the image is still grainy. Any thoughts on how to correct that?

    Thanks!

  • Someone

    When deleting vertices to create the map for the building, it is just quicker to separate them into a new object and just use this object for the roads. ;)

  • http://none Mike T.

    Great Video! It really explains the UV unwrapping well. Sorry about your fearful trip to the states. Personally if you want to see America the best parts are FAR away from the cities. If It makes you feel any better it would be Normal to cry if lost in downtown LA. Been there done that!.. Next time you come check out some of our national parks…you will have blender material for a lifetime there.

  • http://blender3dtutorialsandlessons.blogspot.com/ Darrin

    Quick tip to vary building size — which can greatly increase realism in the final image:
    increase the Random Size parameter under the Particle context’s Physics panel, and increase Size, right above Random, until just before the buildings overlap.

  • Lucas

    http://www7.pic-upload.de/18.05.12/671dnqoscmhu.jpg

    here is the picture of my problem

    • Guest

      Seems that you didn’t apply your UV-coordinates to the texture as the vector says “default”.

  • Lucas

    Hello, I have a problem with the textures, if i unwrap the texture i one of the sides is everytime unsharp. I hope anyone can help me if you need i can upload a picture of my problem.

  • http://nositeyet Matt

    Hello everyone, huge fan of blender been using since build 2.49 love the new interface and imporved controls of 2.62 and I have been following andrews tutorials since the subway. I have a small problem here of my darker textures rendering jet black. The lighter color ones like HighRise_504_2_S render just fine, even the glass ones are black and I wasn’t having trouble before with them until today when I decided to start from scratch. Is this something I can fix with the compositor somehow?

    • http://nositeyet Matt

      Well I don’t know what the problem was I reapplied textures in render viewport mode one at a time and they came back. {shrugs} oh well, Add that one to your next video spoof on the stuff bender users say mate.

  • paleo

    Okay, here are the results of my project (so far, I may do a night image as well):

    http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?255009-City-panorama

    Hope you like it :-)

  • Danish

    Guys I am new to this…..Please can you help me get basic’s of blender…like easy tutorials….

  • Renato

    Where did you get the textures ? Please, answer !

    • paleo

      Not sure whether you referred to me, but I guess pretty much everyone here (including Andrew) uses textures from cgtextures.com. There’s really something for any project there, and you can freely use the textures even for commercial projects as far as I know (not relevant to me, though ;-) ).

      • Renato

        Thanks

  • paleo

    I have been able to apply many of the tips of this tutorial to my own project of a Coruscant-style futuristic city, which I want to print out as a poster eventually. I have adapted it to the Blender internal render engine, though, and also worked with the texture space rather than UV unwrapping. This is my result so far (I’m still tweaking some textures, and have added some more foreground buildings since this render – somehow, no matter how many objects you have, Blender still likes to place identical objects next to each other ;-) ):

    http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?254252-A-morning-in-the-city

    • Louis

      Awesome pic. nice city. did you use vertex groups or did you cut the plane to make space for the big buildings? I just drove from NYC and there are a lot of apartment buildings that look alike next to each other. Sometimes they are rotated to make a courtyard in the center. Is there a way to have blender rotate the particles that way?

  • Skul

    Hello, I am a very new blender user who is making this city as a class project. I have gotten it fine up to the first rendering of the city (immediately after placing the sun lamp). However, when I render it, the buildings do not have the right color: they are all the pink color that the lamp is set to instead of looking realistic like yours. If anyone could help me with this problem I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you in advance.

    • Chester

      I think your lamp is just too bright.
      Try dropping the energy/distance levels, that should help. (:

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/Francescodibuono frabuondi

    I was looking for a way to create a city for ages! thank you andrew!!

    on a side note… I found that if you set the emission to faces instead of vertices, and then set the particles/faces ratio to 1 (and random unchecked) you can have cleaner rows of buildings and better alignement. Besides you will have natural pavements this way

    Thanks again… I’m still experimenting on the finished result… however

    http://youtu.be/ekgv7SX0xr4

    • frabuondi

      another neat trick I’ ve come with is to create two planes: 1 for the particles/platforms and another one for the roads….

      You duplicate the first after the subdivision and before any texturing, this way they will have same number and size of faces.

      Then you apply a road texture to the 2nd by choosing “follow active quads” in the unwrapping menu.

      Last you just have to rotate the roads who should appear horizontally and you ‘re done!

  • Vince

    One thing I would recommend is using taxi models, because in big cities there’s a large ratio of taxis to other cars…

  • Thomas

    If you want multiple UV-Maps in Cycles, just add an Attribute-node and type in the name of desired UV-Slot in the text-input-field. Then take the vector-output of that Attribute-node and feed it in the UV-input of watever node needs this UV-coordinates. ;)

  • Thordur

    Hi, i have a problem with the building textures, when i finished modeling one building i duplicated it and made some different ones from that, now when i want to change the material on any one of them it changes on all, for example i remove the side material on one building but all the buildings get it removed. Not sure what to do here.

    Thordur G.

    • Chester

      What you have to do is after you’ve duplicated the building, in the materials panel (make sure the sides material is chosen and that the second building is selected, as well) you need to push the little ’2′ button near the top right, just under all the materials you have.

      Picture example: http://i43.tinypic.com/25zguuh.png
      you’ll see that the button you need to hit is selected in ride outline. :D

  • Chester

    Just posting this again, since it’s an older post, still need help though. :)

    —-

    About half way through the tutorial, right before you start cutting away at the plane, to make streets, that’s where I’m stuck.
    My plane is ABOVE the buildings, instead of under them.
    I thought it might just be a bug, and you have a newer version of blender then I do, but I dunno. o;

    • http://Home Jonathan Torres

      Not Sure if you Still Need help but, Make sure you buildings Points(that orange thing on your objects) is at the Bottom of them. Also another thing that can do that is Make sure your Objects are On or above the X-axis(Red Line) Hope that solves your Problem :)

      • Chester

        Thanks, Jonathan, but that still didn’t help. :/
        I just updated Blender last night, maybe I’ll just try the whole thing over and see what happens. Maybe it was just one of those tiny details that changes the whole thing that I missed, haha.

      • Blanco111

        I’m a beginner. I’m on my eleventh building. It’s going slow. One question I have (out of hundreds) is the origin of the building. A little orange dot appears in the middle of each. I notice when I initially make the cube bigger along the z axis, I have to move it above the x and y axes. After reading your post, I placed the cursor at the bottom of the eleventh building, and then did a shift-ctr-alt c (which I recall from another tutorial) and chose origin to 3d cursor. The little orange dot then moved to the bottom of the building. Am I on the right track? I have a feeling, I’m going to need help when I get to the particle part of this tutorial, and I usually ask my questions in the Blender Artists Community forum, but your post got me concerned. Did I do the right thing by moving the origin? Any suggestions related to doing this?

  • ThreeDeez

    Great Stuff!! ahhh ohh no i don’t have any money!!

  • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

    @Akshat : Hi, when using hair particles, there are several parameters to control the length of the particles (so, the length of objects when objectsare used as particles) :

    1 – The Normal value, in VELOCITY/Emitter Geometry field.
    2 – X,Y,Z in VELOCITY/Emitter Object : For buildings, use only Z and set the Normal value to 0 in VELOCITY/Emitter Geometry field.
    3 – Length in CHILDREN/Effects parameters if you use Children particles.

    Some other parameters can also act on objects length in some specific situations, I think.

  • Akshat

    Mate when i add bulidings to group and then add them to hair particles system some of them are stretched really Long!!

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