The Unreal Engine 5 City Sample is impressive — but it’s often treated as a black box. In this course, you’ll learn how to break it open, understand how it really works, and use the same pipeline to create your own custom procedural city using Houdini and the latest version of Unreal Engine 5. This is a production-oriented course, focused on real workflows rather than simplified demos. You’ll start by setting up the correct City Sample project, configuring your Houdini and Python environments, and making sure your pipeline is clean and reliable from the beginning.
From there, you’ll move into Houdini, where you’ll procedurally design your city layout:
- Create arterial road splines
- Build a grid-based city structure
- Define city zones to control building heights
- Add a closed freeway system
- Prepare and process city data for Unreal Engine
You’ll learn not only how to build these systems,but why certain design choices are made when working with large-scale procedural cities. Once the data is ready, you’ll bring everything into Unreal Engine 5 using the Houdini Engine plugin. You’ll import geometry and point-based cloud data, organize the City Sample project correctly, create an open-world level, and drive the city using rule processors for buildings and freeways.
In the final section, you’ll bring your city to life and make it scalable:
- Generate traffic using the Zone Graph system
- Build HLODs using both the Unreal Engine interface and the command line
- Learn how to troubleshoot common HLOD issues on large cities
By the end of this course, you won’t just have a city — you’ll understand the entire Houdini–Unreal Engine 5 city pipeline,
from procedural layout and data preparation to traffic systems and optimization.
