Hi everyone,
City Lights is out on Fab. It started with a simple problem: I wanted night aerials of a big city without placing thousands of lights and car meshes, so everything you see is drawn by materials.
What it does
- Streets: draw a spline and the street builds itself. Traffic runs on thin strips along the spline: headlights coming toward you, taillights going away, with buses, trucks, motorcycles, taxis, and emergency vehicles in the mix. Streetlights, their light pools, glow, and poles come with the same spline, in five patterns.
- Windows: one material function added to your own building material lights the windows, the shops on the ground floor, and the blinking roof lights. It works in the mesh’s local space, so your buildings need no UVs.
- One actor for the whole city: car density, vehicle types, streetlights, windows, time, and colors, all keyable in Sequencer.
Numbers
The demo city has 205 streets, 1,691 buildings, and 3,278 streetlights, and none of the lights is a light actor. On my RTX 2080 Ti the system itself costs 1.0 to 1.5 ms of GPU time in the widest view. Blueprints and materials only, no plugins, UE 5.1 to 5.8.
Links
- Fab: City Lights: Night City Traffic | Fab
- Full tutorial (22 minutes): https://youtu.be/ScTeFUExgIk
- Documentation: City Lights V1.0 Documentation - Google Slides
- Discord, for questions and support: Madgoat Support
I’m happy to answer questions here about how the traffic shader or the windows work.