Build a stylized anime night city in Blender. Shape towers from sliders, click Make City for an endless glowing skyline, and jump back to edit any building whenever you want — the whole city updates with you. There's a day/night sky with a visible sun and moon and distance haze, so the far towers dissolve into the horizon. It's EEVEE-first, so a full glowing city runs on a laptop — no render farm. Blender 5.1, fully local.
In Blender (5.1): Edit → Preferences → Add-ons, top-right dropdown → Install from Disk…. Select sprawl-0.2.5.zip — don't unzip it first.
After installing, quit Blender fully and reopen it so the add-on loads cleanly — a running session won't hot-reload a freshly installed module.
Tick the checkbox next to Sprawl. In the 3D viewport press N → the Sprawl sidebar tab.
Set the Base (height, width, depth), the Middle facade (floors, floor height, windows across, window scale, lit odds), and the Top. Toggle Box or Round / Oval, and pick a Concrete color — every building can hold its own.
Click Build Building to drop it in. Each build lands in the next row slot, so successive clicks lay out a skyline. Set the Seed back to an existing building to tweak that one instead.
Click Randomize to roll a whole new tower — varied floors, footprint, windows, and shape — and drop it in a row. The roll writes into the sliders, so it's transparent and tweakable.
Click Make City and Sprawl arrays your buildings into a grid — random placement, random turns, and empty lots so it never looks tiled — and sets up the night sky, a dark street, and distance haze for you. It uses collection instances, so a big city stays light enough to work with.
Rows, Columns, Lot spacing, Empty lots, and a Layout seed control the shape of the sprawl. Re-run it any time to reroll the layout.
Click Edit Buildings to hide the city and show your template buildings. The city is made of instances of these templates, so editing a template flows to every copy — you're never locked in.
Click a building (a template or a city instance) and hit Edit Selected to load its settings back into the panel. Change its windows or color, then Rebuild This Building to rebuild it in place.
Click Show City and Sprawl rebuilds the skyline from your current templates on the same layout — so your edit reaches every copy. Bounce between Edit and City as much as you like.
The Scene sky panel sets the mood — Day or Night — with a visible sun or moon at the light source. Add night glow lights the windows.
A depth-masked haze fades the far towers into the horizon color, so the city reads as endless. Subtle on a compact grid; a fly-through shows the full range.
Want to make facade maps by hand first? Facadr is a free, in-browser generator for the color / height / normal / emission maps — a nice companion, though Sprawl doesn't need it.
The questions people actually hit. Tap one to open it.
Sprawl ships as a folder add-on, zipped up as sprawl-0.2.5.zip (the number matches whatever version you downloaded). Edit → Preferences → Add-ons, top-right dropdown → Install from Disk…, pick the .zip — don't unzip it first.
First, make sure you fully quit and reopened Blender after installing — a running session won't hot-load a freshly installed add-on. Still missing after that? Hover the 3D viewport, press N, and check its checkbox is ticked in Edit → Preferences → Add-ons (search "Sprawl").
Sprawl needs Blender 5.1 or newer — that's a higher floor than most of our other add-ons, which run on 4.2+. Installing it on an older Blender won't work. Version 0.2.5 is checked building buildings, setting the sky, and Make City in Blender 5.2 LTS.
That's the actual message Sprawl gives you: "— build a building first." Click Build Building at least once before Make City or Show City — the city is built from your towers, so there has to be at least one.
Each Build click with a new Seed adds a new tower. To change an existing one instead, set the Seed back to that building's number, then click Build — it rebuilds that tower in place rather than adding another.
That's expected. The Scene sky (Day/Night) buttons set the View Transform to Standard on purpose — Blender's default Filmic view would grey out the pastel toon palette Sprawl is built around.
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Starting Frame. — the guide · startingframe.com
Sprawl · build a glowing anime city from sliders, then make an endless skyline in one click.