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3D Visualization & Analytics

CityEngine 2017.1 release highlights

By Matt Miller


With the new CityEngine 2017.1, we worked hard to bring you new features that will meaningfully impact how you work and take your 3D modeling and planning to a whole new level. Here are just a few highlights of CityEngine 2017.1. Learn more about our many new enhancements and fixes in the 2017.1 release notes. Also, go to My Esri to upgrade to CityEngine 2017.1. Or, if you are new to CityEngine, try it now with a fully functional free trial version.

 

Visibility Analysis tools for planners

CityEngine 2017.1 introduces a new set of interactive Visibility Analysis tools. You can use these tools, for example, to assess the vista from an apartment in a new building site or determine whether a specific building blocks a protected view. You can perform visibility analyses of static and dynamic models, streets, and terrain. The Viewshed and the View Dome tools are designed to conveniently allow you to identify visible and nonvisible areas of your 3D model from one or multiple observer points. The View Corridor tool models protected views, such as to and from historic sites in your scene. The buildings in your scenarios that interfere with the view corridor are highlighted automatically. This makes it easy for you to design the silhouettes of your proposals to fit optimally into your city model.

 

High-end architectural visualization with Unreal Engine

“CityEngine allows us to model HOK’s massive urban planning projects. In the past, creating interactive high-end visualizations of several hundred thousand buildings was a challenge. Now, with the new CityEngine 2017.1, we can export directly to Unreal Engine. This enables us to craft fluid, data rich, real-time rendered experiences for our clients and stakeholders.”
Christopher Zoog, Design Technology Specialist, HOK

CityEngine brings high-end architectural modeling to Unreal Engine. Interactive experiences, whether on the screen or in VR, are the next big step in architectural visualization. The demand for faster turn-around times prompted a shift from expensive ray-tracing to interactive game-engine-based visualizations. Esri worked with the development team of Epic Games’ industry leading Unreal Engine to streamline the transfer of your CityEngine scenes into the Unreal development environment. This provides the foundation to build 3D experiences that allow you to walk through realistically rendered city models or even create a fully fledged 3D game. Learn more about the new CityEngine-to-Unreal workflow at the recent Unreal Engine SIGGRAPH User Group Meeting.

 

Collaborative layer editing with the ArcGIS platform

Now CityEngine can sync updates to polygon feature layers hosted on ArcGIS Online across the ArcGIS platform. You can import the polygon feature layers into CityEngine and modifications can be synchronized. The layer synchronization can solve edit conflicts and allows for collaborative editing on the same layer. This means the layer can be simultaneously edited by multiple planners using CityEngine, ArcGIS Pro, a web app based on ArcGIS API for JavaScript, or other ArcGIS apps.

Let us know what you think in your comments below. Enjoy.

-the CityEngine team

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