At Sim-Plates, building believable environments isn’t just about the plates themselves, it’s about every detail that makes a road scene feel real. Here’s a look at one of our latest in-house pipeline developments, straight from our Co-Founder and Head of CG, Mike Hodgetts.

The Sim-Plates procedural Highway Sign Generator, built entirely in Blender Geometry Nodes, is one generator that does everything from a speed-limit sign to a full freeway gantry and can create a wide range of US highway signage from a single system: from simple roadside regulatory signs to full overhead gantries with multiple destination, route, and exit panels.

Text, route shields, arrows, exit tabs, panel sizing, colors, supports, and gantry layouts are all generated procedurally, making it possible to create believable, location-specific US highway signage in seconds.

Sign dimensions are driven by the content itself, with fully configurable options at every level. The system is designed to produce signage that feels appropriate to the road and location, while keeping the whole process fast enough for large-scale environment dressing.

The result is a much quicker way to build believable, location-specific highway scenes without manually modeling and laying out every sign, and without sacrificing the details that make a road scene feel convincing.

Tools like this are part of how we keep our environments production-ready, location-specific, and built to hold up on camera at the speed modern productions demand.