Sim-Plates Procedural Road Generator: Built for Versatility, Designed for Realism
Next month, Sim-Plates’ Co-Founder & Head of CG, Mike Hodgetts, will be speaking at Blender Conference 2025 in Amsterdam, where he will be demonstrating some of the procedural toolsets and workflows we use to create our driving plates.
To celebrate, we are giving you a sneak peek behind the curtain at just one part of our pipeline — our Procedural Road Generator. If you’ve seen any of our recent plates, you’ve already seen it in action. The road is the starting point for all our plates and it’s designed to scale across a wide variety of roadway types, terrains and configurations.
We will begin with the below video demonstration. Every part of it is procedural; all the traffic, the foliage, the pedestrians, the buildings – all of it can easily be edited and defined by user-controlled parameters.
Next up are some examples of our Node UI where you can see the wide range of settings used for customization.
Taking a deeper dive into what the generator can do:
Feature Overview
Lane and Shoulder Customization
The Road Generator allows us to define:
•Number of lanes
•Lane width and median configurations
•Individual shoulder widths and offsets (left/right, inner/outer)
•Lane markings, including solid, double, dashed, yellow, and white variants
Terrain Banks & Side Profiles
One of the standout features is the ability to create Banks – not to be confused with banking or road tilt. Banks refer to the side geometry adjacent to the road surface: these can be configured as gravel verges, grass embankments, or even concrete sidewalks.
Lane Markings & Dividers
Lane markings are fully procedural and support independent customization for:
•Shoulders (white/solid lines)
•Center lines (dashed, double, or solid, yellow or white)
•Inside and outside shoulders for multi-lane setups
This system supports U.S. road standards out of the box but can be repurposed for international layouts.
Median Mode: Divided Roads
A toggleable Median mode allows for dual-sided roads with a configurable central reservation — ideal for highways, freeways, or split roads with physical medians or terrain dividers.
Procedural Pavers and Sidewalks
Need sidewalks? Just enable Pavers On, adjust dimensions, and define materials. The generator takes care of the geometry and alignment automatically, ideal for urban scenes or commercial districts.
Material Support for Realism
Each section including the road, banks, medians, and pavers can be assigned its own material, with adjustable UV scaling.
The Final Product
Built to Scale
From a single-lane mountain road to a 10-lane freeway with dynamic shoulders and sculpted terrain banks, our Road Generator is designed for total scalability.
It’s performant, fast to iterate, and built with clean node logic under the hood (displayed below).
Road Generator Nodes
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this small behind-the-scenes tour. Sim Plates continues to push the envelope in environment generation, and this Road Generator is just one part of our wider toolset. If you’re a studio, content creator, or production house interested in high-end procedural road solutions — get in touch because we’d be excited to see if we can help bring your project to life! Thanks so much for reading!
