What runs in the cloud

What your machine does, free

The whole of Draft runs on your own computer. The engine — the program that owns your city — is a separate process that lives beside Blender, not inside it. You start it from Draft (Start Engine, or Start with default on an empty project's Start screen) and stop it from the header. It needs no account, no connection and no credits.

• —Drawing and editing roads, junctions, regions, lots and massing, and every parameter that drives them.
• —Assigning a material or a prop you already have in your library to a category. The dressed viewport re-skins as you assign, and the category stays pinned to that asset for future dresses.
• —Start with default theme on the Design Theme screen, which copies the bundled theme files into your project and dresses the city from them.
• —Append from a project, which copies another local project's theme files into this one.
• —Dress City from Outputs, which applies outputs.usd, outputs.csv and assets.json that are already in the project folder.
• —Project sync — the footer button that uploads the project folder with a message. It needs you signed in, but it is not a generation job and costs no credits.

What the cloud does, for credits

Anything that makes an asset that did not exist before runs on Parametra's servers. Every one of these needs you signed in and connected, and every one spends credits.

• —A theme — the full set of materials, props and elements for your city, plus the dressed outputs. See Generating a theme.
• —A single material or prop, from the Generate with AI popup or a Design card's AI button.
• —A regeneration of a material or prop that is already in your scene. The new seed lands beside the old one rather than replacing it.
• —Generate Model and Generate PBR, which fill in the piece an asset is missing — a mesh for a prop, PBR maps for a material — without changing the asset.
• —Scene props from a screenshot, which imagines props for a framed view and returns images.
• —City sync — the header sync button. After you change the draft it re-dresses the city with the theme you already have. It is a paid job, and unlike project sync it really is automatic. See Re-dressing after a change.

The shape of every job

Themes, materials, props and screenshots all take the same four movements. Only the review step differs between them.

1. Submit. The project is saved (a theme job creates one named Untitled (N) if none is open), the city is exported and uploaded, and the request goes to the cloud. The thread reports Job 1a2b3c4d created — analyzing, and a one-credit analysis fee is charged for the moderation pass.
2. Wait. The step ladder in the composer moves through the stages below. Materials and props that finish early are installed into your library part-way through a theme run.

   what-runs-in-the-cloud-step-ladder.png

   The composer's job card during a live theme job that has reached the Assets step: the ladder showing Submitting, Analyzing, Review, Guides and Assets with the finished steps ticked, Assets lit as the current one, and the derived percentage readable.

   /docs-shots/blender/

3. Review. The job pauses at a gate and waits for you. Nothing continues until you decide.
4. Receive. Assets install into your local library, assets.json is written into the project, the Design cards pick up the new materials and props, and the dressed city is imported and filed into the iCity 2 collection tree, beside the draft objects it dresses. The log closes with Job 1a2b3c4d complete carrying the credits the cloud actually charged.

Not every job visits every step. A material or prop job has no guide review; a re-dress from City sync generates nothing and is over in well under a minute. The percentage on the ladder is derived from which step the job is on, not from the cloud's own progress figure, so it moves in jumps.

These are the gates that can stop a job and ask you something:

• —CHOOSE A THEME — the cloud found library themes matching your prompt. Use this theme adopts one without generating; Generate new ignores them.
• —THEME GUIDES — the reference images for your theme. Approve continues with the seed shown; Regenerate re-rolls them as a new child job.
• —Library Suggestions — close matches for a single material or prop, with the option to use one instead of generating.
• —SCENE PROPS — the screenshot lane's composite, waiting for Approve.

Closing a review popup does not cancel anything. The close button says so — Close (decide later) — and the job sits on the cloud waiting for your answer.

Watching a job, and stopping one

While a job runs, a progress ring appears at the left of the composer's icon row and at the top right of the iCity Logs editor. Both open the same popup, CLOUD ACTIVITY, which shows the step ladder and the cloud log for the run. Cloud log lines do not appear in the Logs editor stream; the composer thread and this popup are where they live.

The composer's ring is only shown while the job is actually running. The Logs editor's badge stays after it ends, coloured by outcome, and a finished run is also still reachable through its card in the composer thread.

To stop a job, use the composer's send button: it becomes a red stop square while a job is active. Cloud Activity has no cancel button, and neither does the Theme Guides review.

Leave Blender open until the job finishes

Job tracking lives entirely in the running Blender session. The job records sit on the window manager, and the poll that watches the cloud is a timer registered when you press send. Neither is written to disk and nothing starts them again.

Dress City from Outputs is still the right thing to run for the other case: the outputs did download, but the city was never dressed — for example because a completion poll failed. It has no button on any panel; press F3 and search for its name. It is safe to run more than once, because the linker clears what a previous dress created rather than stacking on top of it.

What a job costs before you press send

The figures the Generate with AI popup shows are fixed numbers built into the addon, not a live quote from the server. Treat them as an order of magnitude. The credits you were actually charged appear on the completion line in the log.

Every accepted submit also charges a one-credit analysis fee for the moderation pass, whatever the job turns out to cost. Approving guides and regenerating guides both spend credits — each re-roll is its own job with its own moderation pass — so a theme you re-roll twice costs more than the numbers above.

What credits are, where yours come from and what an organization pools are covered in Credits & plans.