Skip to content
Udemy3d Game DevelopmentPaid courseIntermediate levelCertificate

Learn to Program & Model Procedural Cities in Unity/Blender (Udemy.com)

Your guide to understanding procedural construction of buildings and city maps for games and virtual environments

Created by: Penny de Byl

Last updated November 2024

icon
What you will learn

  • Explain the nature of 3D space and producing a grid for displaying and snapping 3D models together.
  • Identity several procedural algorithms that can be applied to generate virtual city maps.
  • Apply fractal and dynamic methods to algorithmically generate buildings and cities.
  • Create a bespoke procedurally generated city map complete with districts, population densities and vegetation.

icon
Course Description

Procedural generation in games and virtual environments lends itself to the algorithmic generation of infinitely unique computer-created experiences. Its potential lies in its ability to automatically develop digital content on demand, reducing the amount of work required by programmers and modellers. However, a lot of preparation is necessary for such a strategy to be implemented.  A thorough understanding of the role that both sides of the game development coin (technical/logic and art/design) plays in procedural generation is key for a successful implementation. In this course, Penny and Mike bring a unique experience to both programmers and artists alike and combine their skills and many years of industry and academic knowledge to bring you a holistic learning experience, in which you will find content and invaluable mastery.

This course uses Unity 2020.3 and Blender 3.0 and is Windows and Mac compatible.

The content has been tested and works with Unity 6.

The content is presented in two parts which can be studied in any order, independently or together.

In Part A, Mike will be taking you through a series of stages, starting with blocking out your city with simple placeholders, a critical design step often overlooked. Taking those placeholders we add a little extra detail to start bringing the city to life and map out the road system properly. Once that warm-up is out of the way, Mike will start focusing on thinking in a more modular manner by looking at the fundamental building blocks required to make our assets. Then finally, we will move from placing the pieces manually to placing them automatically, first with Blender's Modifier Stack and finally completely procedurally using Blender 3.0's new Geometry Node system.

In Part B, Penny will begin by taking you through a variety of workshops using the Unity game development engine, to teaching you how to manipulate and position road models on a plane to create a city street map.  Following this, algorithms will be worked through to create data structures to store city information and populate the city with residential, commercial, and industrial buildings.  The commonly used algorithms for Voronoi Diagrams and Perlin Noise will be employed to calculate city zones and city population densities.

By the end of this course, you will have a professional toolkit of programming and modelling skills that will give you the advantage over others who are "just programmers" or "just modellers", including knowledge of multiple procedural techniques that can be employed in both Unity and Blender. Understanding game development that tightly integrates both design and logic from this standpoint is critical to making you a valuable commodity in the job market or preparing you for running an indie operation.

What others are saying about Penny's courses:

  • I do like Penny de Byl's courses and way of teaching, they are much more specific than your average "master Unity" kind of courses and usually, you don't learn just the engine but also how things work behind the scenes. She's really amazing!

  • I've been coding for about 3 years and since purchasing Penny's "Animation", and "Procedural Terrain" courses, the excitement and fun have returned once again to my programming.

  • Penny and her team know their stuff and are just amazing in explaining everything, breaking it down. Most importantly she challenges you to do stuff on your own rather than just "spoon-feeding" you everything. Then she comes back and shows you one way of doing it. Just an amazing course!!!

What others are saying about Mike's courses:

  • I've used Blender for a number of years, but I'm a total novice next to Mikey and I've learned so very much from him here!

  • Mikey is an amazing teacher, I can't praise this course highly enough. Worth every penny.

  • Mikey is a talented, thorough, and clear instructor, and he knows how to make the student think 'for themselves', which is such a great experience.

icon
Udemy Discount

The discount is applied through our link. Open the course from here and Udemy's current promotional price is applied at checkout on most courses, no code to type.

Some courses are excluded from Udemy's promotions. If the price does not drop, clear your browser cookies and use the button again.

icon
Instructor Details

Penny de Byl

Hi, I'm Dr Penny de Byl.  I'm a full stack developer of most things computer sciency and academic with a true passion for teaching.  I've been teaching others about games development, programming, computer graphics, animation and web design for over 25 years in universities in Australia and Europe at the full professor level. I've also consulted for Unity, SAE, the Australian Institute of Entertainment and Wikitude. My best selling textbooks including Holistic Game Development with Unity are used in over 100 institutions world-wide.  My graduates work at companies like Apple, Ubisoft, LinkedIn and Deloitte Digital.

I have an honours degree in computer graphics and a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence for games characters.  Over the course of my career I've won numerous awards for teaching excellence at the state, national and international levels including the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's Excellence in Teaching Award and the Unity Mobile Game Curriculum Competition. My approach to teaching computer science and related fields is project-based giving you hands-on workshops you can immediately get your teeth into.

I want you to leave my virtual classroom fully armed with a toolkit of skills for life-long learning.  I'm excited to now be focussing my efforts full-time on Udemy to bring my years of knowledge and experience to those eager to learn about technology.


icon
More courses by Penny de Byl

$84.99

$109.99

$84.99

$94.99

$79.99

$79.99

icon
More 3D Game Development courses

$94.99

$79.99

$149.99

$84.99

$79.99

icon
Reviews

4.7

148 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By 권순재 on 7/19/2026

절차적 도시 생성 꼭 알고 싶었는데 이번기회에 알수 있어서 너무 좋았습니다. 요즘 도시를 배경으로한 오픈월드 게임이 많아서 저도 너무 만들고 싶었는데! 하나하나 구체적으로 어떤식으로 만들어나가는지 알수 있어서 너무 좋습니다! 퍼리 노이즈와 보르조이 알고리즘! 이거 엄청 유용하네요! 강추! 배추! 개추! 아이갓츄!

By Dustin M Crider on 6/30/2026

Penny's stuff is always fun. It is informative, but beyond instruction, I always enjoy her explorative style of teaching. It's a break stuff, try it out, find the limits kind of atmosphere, for me, anyway, and I always end up having a dozen thoughts per video.

By Andrew Zoboki on 11/19/2025

The course has some solid sections and clear explanations of key concepts but has several areas for improvement. To make it stronger: - Some C# examples use error-prone anti-patterns and suboptimal data structures that hurt performance. Switching to modern, idiomatic Unity/C# practices would greatly improve reliability and speed. - Coding style could be more readable, consistent and less error prone formatting. (naming, avoiding magic numbers, etc.). - Perlin noise is over-used; showing a wider range of noise types and techniques would be more valuable. - Frequent “Challenges” interrupt the flow and feel like they extend runtime more than deepen understanding. Removing them would keep momentum. - A number of topics are spread across multiple short videos when they could be combined into one tighter, more focused lesson. Consolidating related content would make the course feel more streamlined and reduce the total watch time without losing depth. With cleaner code, more variety in techniques, and better pacing, this would easily be a top-tier course but right now falls short of being premium content. Still learned some info —thank you!

By Michael O'Brien on 8/30/2024

this was a good course to get started in procedural city generation. Penny used some interesting techniques like raycasting that I would not have thought of to solve some of the placement problems. I've already been able to apply some of the things I've learned in this course to other procedurally generated applications.

By Michael Eric Oberlin on 8/19/2024

Initially I wasn't sure if I would get much out of the Blender portion, as I've been using it for 20+ years; but the presenter has a very detailed understanding of the subject and I in fact have learned a few new tricks. I definitely recommend.

By Jiansenzhu on 11/20/2023

The Blender Section part is really hard to catch up with and I need to slow it down to 0.5 play speed to understand the instructor's mean, I can see that the instructor is very experienced but just need a little patient to make it a blender beginner friendly.

By Christian BRUNEL on 12/25/2022

Excellent cours qui couvre les aspects principaux de la génération procédurale. La partie Design sur Blender est ardue à suivre à cause des innombrables raccourcis claviers de Blender, que maitrise trop bien Mike, et beaucoup moi-même. ;-) J'ai apprécié la progressivité de la partie Unity présentée par Penny, qui permet de bien appréhender les tenants et aboutissants de la génération. La route est encore longue pour moi, pour pouvoir adapter les différentes techniques à mon projet mais les bases sont (bien) posées.

By Dustin Shaffer on 2/11/2022

This genuinely feels like 3 courses in one: Blender Basics, Blender procedural, and Unity procedural. Excellent course.

By Rodrigo Brito on 2/8/2022

Very good course and full of useful tips to learn about PCG, tips not only useful to city generation but that can be easily adapted to other uses.

By Scott Moses on 12/30/2021

Among my favorite courses on Udemy. Practical approaches to procedural generation in both Blender and Unity. Lays the groundwork for a SimCity like game (automated layout). I like Penny and Mike's real world troubleshooting. Penny's C# focused Unity courses are unique and a fun way to explore niche techniques. I used Maya instead of Blender for the sections on 3d object creation. MASH and Bifrost map pretty well to Blender's functionality. I liked Mike's progression through various methods of building creation. However, the course helped me realize how convoluted 3D software Visual Programming (Geometric nodes in Blender, Bifrost in Maya) can be in contrast to python. Python scripted procedural buildings would be an interesting last addition to the methods Mike shows, especially given that the Unity section of the course is C# heavy.

Showing all 10 reviews on CourseDuck

Read all 148 reviews on Udemy

icon
Quality Score

No CourseDuck member has rated this course yet. Taken it? Give each part a thumbs up or down.

Content Quality
/
Video Quality
/
Qualified Instructor
/
Course Pace
/
Course Depth & Coverage
/

Overall Score : 94 / 100