What iCity is — and is not
The iCity 2 development build is a Blender add-on for Windows that generates an editable city from a road graph, in two modules: Draft for structure and Design for dressing. This page explains its scope and limits before you install anything.
What it is
The iCity 2 development integration is an add-on for Blender on Windows. You give it a road network — drawn by hand, built from parameters, or imported from OpenStreetMap — and it fills the land the roads enclose with regions, lots and building masses, then dresses that structure with materials, props and surface detail. The result is ordinary Blender geometry in your scene, and it stays parametric: change a road and what it touched is rebuilt. iCity is being built to bring this workflow to other 3D applications and operating systems, but those integrations are not available yet.
The addon carries a second program inside it, bin/windows/iCity2App.exe, and it is that program — the engine — that holds your city while you edit, not the .blend file, so Blender's save and undo do not reach it. That one fact shapes everything else; How iCity fits with Blender explains it in full and should be your next page.
The iCity 2 workspace tab active, with the iCity Editor panel showing the mode rail and the DRAFT/DESIGN toggle in its header, and a dressed city visible in the 3D viewport beside it. Material Preview shading.
Two modules: Draft and Design
The header of the iCity Editor carries one toggle, DRAFT and DESIGN. Everything in the product sits on one side of it or the other.
Draft is structure. Its mode rail is Graph, Roads, Blocks, Lots, Massing — the road graph itself, road and junction editing, what each region contains, the parcels inside it, and the storeys on top. Draft is where the drawing tools and the selection gizmos live, and none of it responds while the engine is stopped: every mode except Graph shows The iCity engine is not running. Start it to edit your city.
The iCity Editor in DRAFT with Roads mode active, the tool rail showing Draw Road, and a road segment selected in the viewport so its width handles are visible. The engine must be running (the Stop button present in the header).
Design is dressing. Its first tab is Theme, where a city gets its set of materials, props and elements — by Start with default theme, Generate theme or Append from a project. The remaining tabs mirror the Draft modes and carry the per-element panels: Materials, Props, Surface details, and for roads Road Lanes and Markings. Design has no editing gizmos; clicking picks an element so you can dress it.
The iCity Editor in DESIGN with the Theme tab open, showing the three choices Start with default theme, Generate theme and Append from a project, over a dressed city in the viewport.
Design is locked until two things are true: you are signed in, and the scene holds a city. Until then the toggle is disabled and its tooltip says which one is missing — Sign in to access the Design module, or Design dresses your city — draw a graph in Draft first.
What it is not
Everything below is a description of the product as it is built today, not a roadmap. If you need one of these, iCity 2 will not give it to you.
It is not a renderer. The dress builds real Blender materials — Principled shaders with image textures — so Cycles and EEVEE render them, but iCity never adds a light, a world or a camera to your scene. A dressed city rendered as it arrives is unlit. Lighting, framing and render settings are yours, exactly as they would be for any other geometry.
The 3D viewport split in two: the same dressed city in Material Preview on one side and in Rendered shading on the other, with an empty Outliner filter showing no light objects. The Rendered half must read as dark/unlit.
It is not a traffic or crowd simulator. Nothing in an iCity scene moves. The word traffic appears twice in the interface and neither is a simulation: Traffic is one of the three intersection types on a junction (beside Bare and Roundabout), and a traffic island is a piece of road geometry. There are no vehicles, no pedestrians and no animation of any kind.
It is not offline for generation. Drawing and editing in Draft runs on your machine. Making assets does not: themes, materials and props are generated on Parametra's servers, and re-dressing the city after a draft change is a cloud job too. That needs an account, a connection and credits. A full theme is roughly 220–275 credits and about twenty minutes — the composer prints ~219 credits · ~18 min, which is a hard-coded figure rather than a live quote; measured runs came back at 272–274, so budget the higher one. See What runs in the cloud and Credits and plans.
The development build does not run on macOS or Linux. The add-on ships one platform folder, bin/windows, holding the engine executable and its client library. macOS and Linux builds are not available yet.
It is not version-agnostic about Blender. Install it into Blender 4.5 LTS or 5.2. Other versions are not tested, and nothing in the addon stops you from trying one.
It has no exporter of its own. There is no iCity export operator; the Export tab in the editor is switched off in this build. Getting a city into another application is Blender's own File → Export, run on the dressed objects. Rendering and exporting covers what to select first.
Blender’s File menu open with the Export submenu expanded, and the iCity2 Front End collection selected in the Outliner behind it.
It is not a one-click city you then cannot change. The opposite is the point: the first result is a starting position, and roads, regions, lots, floors, materials and props are all editable afterwards. Two limits are worth knowing early. Deleting an element is permanent — the confirmation says a regenerate will not bring it back — and a re-dress replaces the objects the generator produced, so hand edits made on those objects do not survive one. See What survives a re-dress.
What you need before installing
Installing gives you two running programs, not one: Blender, and iCity2App.exe beside it whenever the engine is started. Antivirus and firewall rules that block either one break the addon in ways that look like bugs. Installing iCity 2 has the steps, and Signing in covers the account.
Windows Task Manager on the Details tab, filtered or scrolled so that blender.exe and iCity2App.exe are both visible in the same shot, with Blender open and a project loaded.
System requirements beyond Windows and Blender are not something we can state with confidence yet. iCity holds the whole city in memory and a dressed city is a large scene, so treat a machine that handles heavy Blender work as the baseline.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It fits you if:
- —You work in Blender on Windows and want a city as editable Blender geometry, in your own scene, under your own lighting and render settings.
- —You want to keep changing the layout after the city exists — move a junction, retype a region, add floors — rather than accept a generated result as final.
- —You need a coherent set of materials and props for a city rather than a hand-built kit, and you are willing to spend credits and wait about twenty minutes for one.
- —You are working from a real street network and want to start from an OpenStreetMap import — knowing that Download OSM is the only part of that card that is built. Clean OSM, Convert to iCity Geometry and the two cleanup sliders beside them print “not implemented yet” and do nothing.
It does not fit you if:
- —You need to use this build on macOS, Linux or in another 3D application. The development build supports only Blender on Windows; other host and platform integrations are not available yet.
- —You need vehicles, pedestrians or any moving simulation. That is not part of iCity 2.
- —You cannot reach the internet, or cannot use a cloud service for asset generation, from the machine you work on.
- —You want a finished rendered image out of the box. iCity gives you the city; the shot is your work.
- —You want to hand-model the city and use iCity only as a converter. The generator owns the structure, and hand edits on generated objects are replaced by the next dress.
Where to go next
- —How iCity fits with Blender — the engine, what is saved where, and why Ctrl+S is not enough. Read this before anything else.
- —Installing iCity 2 — the zip, the addon preferences, and the first launch.
- —Signing in — the account, the browser round trip, and what stays locked without one.
- —Your first city — from an empty scene to a dressed city in one sitting.
- —Glossary — where the interface and the underlying code use different words for the same thing, which they often do.
The Discord is fastest for anything scene-specific. Email suits licensing, billing and anything needing a file attached.
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