CityGen builds a district in the style of New York's SoHo cast-iron neighbourhood inside the Unreal Editor.

It is a stylization, not a replica. Street widths and markings follow New York standards, and the buildings draw on the cast-iron and brick architecture of the area, but the layout, the buildings and the signs are generated. No real block, address or business is reproduced.

Choose the size, the seed and how rich the decoration should be, and press Build District. The generator lays out streets by real New York profiles, divides the blocks into lots and assembles every building from cast-iron and brick parts: shop fronts, cornices, fire escapes, signs, stoops, water towers. It then plants trees and places street lamps, traffic signals, café tables and grime. The result is written into your project as ordinary static meshes with collision. It is a level you can edit by hand, walk through, drive through and light as you like. Nothing depends on the plugin at run time.

Why it is different

• Buildings are assembled, not picked from a set. Each lot knows its width, depth and which streets it faces. Corner lots get cast-iron corner buildings with two fronts. Row lots get brick lofts with a cast-iron ground floor. Backs facing a lane get their own facade with windows and a fire escape.

• Streets follow New York standards. There are four street ranks: avenue 30.5 m, street 24.4 m, lane 15.2 m and alley 6.1 m. They come with real lane markings, bus and bike lanes, and ladder crosswalks. Curb ramps meet ADA and PROWAG, and each district is checked numerically.

• Neighbours never look alike. Seven brick scans plus painted brick, colour variants of cast iron, stone and sashes, and a style chosen per lot along both axes. Buildings whose lots touch never share their brick or cast-iron colour.

• A closed location. By default a ring of main streets surrounds the district, lined with buildings that face inward. No empty edge is visible from the roads.

• Terrain aware. A district can follow gentle terrain. Streets lie on the slope, buildings stay level, and stone plinths and platforms close the gap between them.

Weather and time of day

• 17 presets plus a Custom weather: clear, cloudy, overcast and fog; drizzle, rain, thunderstorm and after the rain; four autumn moods; snowfall, winter, slush and wet slush at the curbs.

• Every preset is fully tunable on the map: sun, direct sunlight, sky, exposure, clouds, fog, rain or snow, wet surfaces, puddles, snow cover, wind, foliage, autumn colour and lightning.

• The sun follows the latitude of New York. Street lamps switch on at dusk. Apartment windows and shop fronts light up as the daylight fades. Café umbrellas fold at night and in snow.

• The same weather works in a packaged game. Blueprint nodes change the weather and the hour, and a Day Cycle Speed setting runs the clock by itself.

Your own textures or Megascans

• Every texture set in the district can be replaced with your own or with Megascans. There are 23 sets: seven bricks, stone, concrete, stucco, painted metal, painted wood, roofing, asphalt, sidewalk slabs, curb stone, tree pit soil, awning fabric and the bark of five tree species.

• In the Materials panel you drop in a colour map, a DirectX normal and a packed map (ORM, or Megascans ORDp / ARD), set the tile size in metres and press Replace Textures. Every building and street using that set updates.

• There are no mesh edits and no rebuild. Paint colours, wear, grime and weather effects stay on top of the new surface.

• One click restores the built-in textures. The replacements are saved in the project config, so the whole team shares them through version control.

Workflow

• One-click Build District. Every setting sits in the Details panel, and there are five presets: SoHo Default, Broadway, Backstreets, Dense Core and Seventies Vacant Lots.

• Size from 1×1 to 6×6 blocks, a custom number of blocks, or width and length in metres.

• A 6×3 district of 372 buildings builds in under two minutes on an RTX 3060 / 12-core PC.

• New Seed rebuilds the district in place with a new layout. Rebuild Lot gives a single building a new variant. When only street-life settings have changed, only street life is rebuilt, in about 10 seconds.

• A Performance Preset menu item: 42 → 62 fps on a 6×3 district (RTX 3060, 1080p).

What is included

A ready-to-build demo map, 1,157 modular kit meshes, 87 textures (CC0 photo scans at up to 4K), master materials with procedural wear, weather effects and a full user guide.

Made for Lumen, Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps.

Support: Support and free updates

CityGen is actively maintained. Every buyer receives all future updates at no extra cost: support for new Unreal Engine versions, new features and ongoing improvements.

If you have a question, an idea, or something in your project doesn't behave as you expect, write to [email protected]. Every message gets a personal reply. Whatever comes out of it is included in the next update, for all buyers.