(See short tutorial here) ( web scene) Building Maass of Lower Manhattan created in CityEngine, Source:Adele PierreĬityEngine specializes in quick model generation, so while the building footprint and height are true, any special features of the building need to be modelled separately. The scene was then uploaded to ArcGIS web viewer and made public. Buildings were generated in less than a minute. Because Lower Manhattan is such a well-documented area, the OSM file was rich in analytical information. Working from the previous Figureground, all shapes were selected and OSM chosen in the Inspector window as the height source. (See short tutorial here) Figure Ground of Lower Manhattan created in CityEngine, Source:Adele Pierre 2. Importing only the building layer resulted in a quick and effective Figure Ground. Open Street is open source so it works best with a well-known city, in this case Lower Manhattan. I tried importing data from Open Street Maps (OSM). A simple project using real data.ĬityEngine supports a wide range of file formats. Here are just a few of the uses I have found for CityEngine as a landscape architecture student learning the software: 1. The challenge is greater setting up specific projects. After watching a few of the tutorials it is quite simple to generate a new city. There are two excellent sets of tutorials provided by Esri, one from 2012 and the other 2015. As changes are made to a design, impacts become immediately apparent.
#Cityengine 2015 software
It differs from many other software programs not only in speed of modelling, but in the powerful analytics embedded right in the model. Having said that, the program is very powerful and worth the time invested. I found CityEngine to have a fairly steep learning curve, especially if you are not that familiar with modeling and parametric design. My approach to this fairly new software is to just dive in and try it, seeing how intuitive the program is. Besides being a quick way of generating an entire community, the models generated can contain analytical information such as zoning, square footage or energy consumption. For example, buildings can vary between set heights and styles, and a mix of residential and commercial use specified. Procedural rules are a shortcut to modelling you set the parameters and the information for everything from building height to bike lane width, then apply the relevant rule to the pertinent layer. *Added a water.cga layer for a better visual.A few months ago, I was introduced to CityEngine, a 3D modeling software program from Esri that uses ‘procedural rules’ to quickly generate entire cities. Texture the terrain with the georeferenced cropped basemap.jpeg.Open CityEngine and import the terrain (DTM).Export to a folder within a CityEngine project workspace.Choose Force RGB and Use Renderer, and export as a compressed JPEG.Right click the georeferenced cropped basemap.jpeg and click export data.Make sure satisfaction is reached for the map alignment and there is no spatial warping or major distortion.Choose 3-4 control points on the basemap layer and georeference the points to the DTM layer.Center the data view to the DTM layer and on the Georef toolbar see the cropped basemap.jpeg layer and click fit to display.Set the geographic coordinates when prompted to that of the DTM layer.In ArcMap, right click add data and select the cropped basemap.jpeg.This should be almost the same extent as the project boundary shapefile. Crop the white boundary around the basemap so that only the colored map regions are left.Open Paint or any other software with a simple clipping tool.Click the clip to shape and select the project boundary.Right Click the data frame layer in the Table of Contents and go to properties.In ArcMap, re-use that project boundary shapefile that was used to clip the DTM.CityEngine disallows resolutions greater than 4000×4000 pixels per image. Make sure the terrain is a compatible size for CityEngine.I chose the National Geographic Map for this exampleĢ.ESRI offers basemaps such as: Topo, Streets, Aerial, Light Gray Canvas, Open Street Map, Nat’l Geographic, etc.I will outline the workflow to get any ESRI basemap layer as a terrain layer in CityEngine. If you take a screen shot of the basemap layer it will definitely lose resolution quality. The basemaps that can be added are not downloadable. Sometimes a project’s data can be more legible above a thematic basemap.ĮSRI allows the use of streaming basemaps as a service within ArcGIS online or ArcMap. Perhaps you are getting bored of using aerial imagery as a terrain texture.