Elliot Hartley

What’s new in ArcGIS CityEngine 2022.0?

This post is a duplicate from Elliot’s personal blog ‘GeoPlanIT’ located here.

It’s that time again when Esri release’s a new version of CityEngine. Now supposedly the .0 releases I always though were where big features were released and .1 releases where improvements and bug fixes… but to be honest the recent releases don’t feel like that pattern holds. Yes, this weeks release does have some new features and whether they feel significant really depends on your work. Let’s discuss the headlines, you’ll get my mood is a little more downbeat for this release in places… maybe it’s just been a long week. Esri staff who have busted a gut getting this release out always have my eternal thanks but please don’t feel offended if I want more :)

*A new demo project I’m working on…. yes I know the buildings are blocky…*

Holding out for street improvements? They’ve changed the interface a little and I don’t think for the better in areas, I liked knowing numbers of what I was selecting and the icons are not I feel as clear as using words. Yes the new improvements allow for better selection but otherwise streets work the same as previous releases.

New icons and behaviour in the Inspector window for streets. You now have to rely on tooltips to see how many you have selected. I am not a fan of these icons new users won’t know what they mean, also are we still calling street centre lines segments??

Selection methods are a key skill in CityEngine use and can make or break some workflows my clients use! I always lament the select by group being moved from the right-click context menu personally. In this release they have added a selectin lasso tool which honestly I am not sure was ever on my wish list! It’s a good addition but there is more I feel we could have here.

*Startup screen is now just another window pane… I feel this could be improved with more functionality perhaps….*

This has been sold as key improvement a new start-up experience. Considering most of the time I used to just close this dialog box down anyway, having it a permanent part of the interface isn’t quite the win perhaps developers thought it would be, certainly for me! For new users this means your previously open file history is in a proper window which I think makes sense, especially for new users.

Custom reference systems are better now and fit better with the transform tools. Not something I use a lot but for other industries I think this is probably important.

*Checkbox for twinmotion compatible export removes ability to export terrain…. I guess I am still using FBX for this…*

The big headline here is better support for Twinmotion with a checkbox option on unreal datasmith exporter… a small improvement but will have a big impact on those who (like me) love Twinmotion. Historically I’ve been using FBX with Twinmotion, I’ve had less work to do in Twinmotion and support seems pretty solid. I think this improvement will get me more involved in datasmith though. I support additional improvements for working with Twinmotion especially when it comes to terrains.

In Summary

To be honest I always want more from every new release of CityEngine. This is a solid release (look at the changelog for more details) as previous ones are so definitely download it. As always, keep your old installations of CityEngine and work on demo data before adopting this fully into your workflows! Remember Esri can’t anticipate how you work with CityEngine always!

Sitting outside of Esri and working on real-world projects as well as training clients in a variety of professions means I see and feel the limitations of CityEngine more keenly hence my slightly downbeat mood today. From my experience CityEngine has had more interest from my clients in the urban design/city planning professions recently (last year) as their clients start to expect more intelligent design with metrics and high quality visualisations. If I was to ask Esri developers to focus on one thing it is workflows, and by that I mean data imports and exports of not just geometry but also metrics… make it even easier and smoother to do these things. Look at what their urban design/city planning clients are doing and want to do.

Lastly a big thank you to the Esri developers, I know it’s difficult please everyone! This is a good release, go and download it from your ‘my.esri’ portal thingy.

Links

*A new demo I am working on with the help of Twinmotion, yes a block city with no doors…. obviously a Work In Progress (WIP)*

Uncategorised

ArcGIS CityEngine 2020.1 – What’s new?

Always my favourite time of year a new ‘ArcGIS’ CityEngine release, of course I’ve been on the beta so nothing has surprised me. You should be able to download from your ‘my.esri.com’ account shortly (if not now). As with most ‘.1’ releases there seems be a whole bunch of minor improvements. I think the main highlights for people are the inclusion of a USD importer (for CGA and general import) that builds on support for USD exports in 2020.0. There’s now support for LOD’s in exports for Unreal (via datasmith), this requires you to code your CGA properly like the Redlands Redevelopment example.

CityEngine is used for military purposes as well…

Improvements on street creation (so you can snap to shapes) I like, but I wish you could fix street segments to an axis. Lots of people use CityEngine to create street grids and this would help. The workaround for now seems to be create square shapes (which you can draw to an axis direction) and draw a street that snaps to it.

ArcGIS Urban integration moves forward with building type alignments and ‘skyplane’ attributes. I like ArcGIS Urban but for me I can’t help seeing it as a less flexible frontend to CityEngine. Planners in some local governments should love it though!

The support of CSV files was a big improvement to CityEngine and they’ve added a transpose function to the mix with this release. They also seem to have produced a new tutorial for it as well.

Whilst those are the ‘Esri’ headlines on improvements this release, I’m happy to see the Plant Loader (in Esri.Lib) has been updated to use CSV files (this is a fantastic use case for CSVs in CityEngine too). Improvements to the RPK export, validation and better handling of referenced assets, should make sharing CityEngine rules easier and more reliable. The addition of perpendicular snapping in the measurement tool is welcome.

As always I recommend creating a specific workspace for CityEngine 2020.1 and importing/copying from previous versions into here using the CityEngine import project tool. This means you can always load up old projects in previous versions (CityEngine can run alongside multiple versions of itself).

There are a lot of additions and improvements (albeit minor), if you really want all the details check the links below:

Finally, if you’re still asking… Should you download and start using it? YES

Esri

CityEngine highlights from the Esri UC 2020

This is a great glimpse into what’s possible with CityEngine, well worth watching, look at all the plugins for 3rd party software as well!

News

ArcGIS CityEngine 2020.0: What’s new?

NOTE: This is an revised version of the blog post I made available at GeoPlanIT.

Aside from the new name (Esri has been swapped for ArcGIS) this is a new .0 release of CityEngine which means it should have some new features.

“Changed the full name of CityEngine from Esri CityEngine to ArcGIS CityEngine to better align with the ArcGIS product family.”
Esri’s CityEngine release notes for 2020.0

This seems like a bigger release befitting of a .0 release (the point .1s are for fixing things generally). Better ‘SketchUp-like’ editing tools which may be of use to some (I prefer SketchUp personally for that kind of thing), an improved interface for some tools (a new Tool Options window pane for one thing).

On the CGA front a headline of improved CSV support and arrays, which means you can use CSV (thing MS Excel tables planners) to control rule operations.

They are making a big thing of improved visual rendering in the viewport which now respects Physical Based Rendering (PBR). This is potentially good for those not wanting to use any other 3^rd party product for visuals, although I’d use something else anyway.

Exporting to Mobile Scene Packages is now available to you, although personally I wish they’d do more with old CityEngine webscene viewer (3WS format) or replicate the swipe tool functionality somewhere.

They have also added support for another format Universal Scene Descriptor (USD) which is great for use in vfx pipelines/workflows…

New webstyles in Esri.lib and metadata for plants (SoilPH) which is nice but hopefully not a distraction.

I’ll be reviewing the other new features over the coming week, and will look at amending the CityEngine course to include the new release. In the meantime feel free to read the blog and release notes.