I wanted a city. The glowing kind — night, neon, a thousand lit windows stacked into a skyline, the sky doing that deep blue-to-black thing behind it. The shot in every anime establishing frame that makes you lean in before anyone’s said a word.
Then I did the math on building one.
A city in Blender is hundreds of buildings. Every building is windows. Every window is a decision — lit or dark, warm or cold, this floor or that one. Model one tower and you’re proud of it. Model the eighty you need behind it and you’re a different, older person by the time you finish. Then you hit render and the laptop starts making the sound.
So I put it off. For a long time. The way you put off the thing you want most, because the want feels smaller than the dread.
What if the buildings built themselves
Here’s the idea I couldn’t shake: I never actually wanted to model a city. I wanted to have one. Those are completely different jobs, and I’d been letting the first one hold the second one hostage.
So I built a tool that skips the first job. I called it Sprawl.
You shape one building with sliders — how tall the base is, the middle, the crown, how dense the windows are, what color the concrete is. Not by pushing vertices around. By feel, watching it change. Then you click one button — Make City — and it fans that one building out into an entire skyline. Towers to the horizon, varied so they don’t look stamped, lit, hazed into the distance. A whole downtown grown from the one building you liked.
The first time it happened I actually laughed. I’d spent a year dreading this and it took a few minutes.
The part I didn’t expect to love: changing my mind
Cities are never right the first time. You build the skyline, you look at it, and you want that tower shorter, this cluster warmer.
So Sprawl keeps a door open both ways — Edit ↔ City. Drop back to one building, change it, and the whole city updates to match. You’re never locked in. The thing I hate most about generated stuff is that it feels final the second it’s made. This doesn’t. It stays soft. You can keep pushing it around until it’s the city you actually saw in your head.
And it’s a real place, not a flat card — a day or night sky with a sun and a moon, distance haze so the far towers fade like they should. You can fly a camera down the streets.
It runs on the laptop you already have
This part was non-negotiable for me. Sprawl is EEVEE-first, which is a nerdy way of saying: it renders fast, on normal hardware, no farm, no waiting overnight, no fans screaming. It works in Cycles too if you want to push it — but the whole point is that a glowing city shouldn’t require a machine you can’t afford.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The look I wanted was always sitting behind a wall of labor and expensive gear. Most of the stuff I make at Starting Frame is me trying to knock down that wall — because I was broke and stuck behind it for years, and nobody handed me the shortcut.
If you’d rather hand-paint the building faces yourself, there’s a free browser tool too — Facadr — that makes the facade maps. No install, nothing to buy. Start there if you just want to play.
The city I’d been putting off for a year took an afternoon, and most of that was me flying the camera around grinning.
You don’t have to model the whole thing. You just have to want the city. Go build one.