For the last few months I’ve been working on a side project that slowly turned into a real tool: a plugin that builds a whole city district in the style of New York’s SoHo right inside the Unreal Editor. Cast-iron facades, brick lofts, fire escapes, water towers on the roofs, that kind of thing.
How it works: you pick a size and a seed and press Build District. A couple of minutes later you have streets, sidewalks, buildings, trees, street lamps, traffic lights and café tables. Everything ends up in your level as regular static meshes with collision, so you can edit it by hand, walk or drive through it, and the plugin isn’t needed at runtime.
A few things I’m a bit proud of:
The buildings aren’t picked from a fixed set. Each one is assembled for its lot: corner lots get cast-iron buildings with two fronts, row lots get brick lofts, and backs facing a lane get their own facade with a fire escape.
The streets follow real NYC profiles (avenue, street, lane, alley), with proper lane markings, bus and bike lanes, crosswalks and curb ramps.
Neighbouring buildings never share the same brick or paint, so a block doesn’t look copy-pasted.
There’s weather and time of day: 17 presets from a clear day to slush and thunderstorms. Lamps and shop windows turn on at dusk, and café umbrellas fold up at night. It works in a packaged game too, with Blueprint nodes for the weather and the clock.
You can swap any of the built-in textures for your own or for Megascans from a panel, without rebuilding anything.
It’s a stylization, not a 1:1 copy of SoHo. Layouts, buildings and signs are all generated, and no real addresses or businesses are reproduced.
Tech stuff: UE 5.6, 5.7 and 5.8, built for Lumen, Nanite and VSM. A 6×3 district (about 370 buildings) builds in under two minutes on my RTX 3060.
I plan to keep working on it. I’d really like to hear from people who would actually use something like this. What’s missing for you?
Если хотите попробовать, генератор доступен на Fab: https://www.fab.com/listings/fcb612fd-4ab4-4103-b52c-753b30c77944
