{"id":1736792,"date":"2022-11-02T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2022-11-02T16:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/?post_type=blog&p=1736792"},"modified":"2022-11-07T09:59:47","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T17:59:47","slug":"bring-your-arcgis-cityengine-models-to-life-in-unreal-engine-with-automated-asset-replacements","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/arcgis-blog\/products\/city-engine\/3d-gis\/bring-your-arcgis-cityengine-models-to-life-in-unreal-engine-with-automated-asset-replacements","title":{"rendered":"Bring Your ArcGIS CityEngine Models to Life in Unreal Engine with Automated Asset Replacements"},"author":127791,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_searchwp_excluded":""},"categories":[23771],"tags":[25781,757181,756352],"industry":[],"product":[36781],"class_list":["post-1736792","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d-gis","tag-3d","tag-unreal-engine","tag-urban-design","product-city-engine"],"acf":{"short_description":"Learn how to replace assets in your ArcGIS CityEngine models with high-quality materials and meshes in Unreal Engine.","flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","content":"

ArcGIS CityEngine<\/a> is powerful 3D modeling software for creating huge, interactive and immersive urban environments in less time than with traditional modeling techniques. Try a 21-day free trial<\/a>\u00a0today.<\/em><\/p>\n","image_reference":false,"layout":"standard","image_reference_figure":"","snippet":"","spotlight_name":"","section_title":"","position":"Center","spotlight_image":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

ArcGIS CityEngine provides powerful tools to procedurally create detailed buildings or large cities. For further processing or visualizations, users often need to export these models to a third-party application.<\/p>\n

Unreal Engine has become a popular tool for architectural visualizations or to create interactive experiences, but a problem users typically face when exporting scenes from ArcGIS CityEngine to Unreal is the lack of high-quality materials and meshes. Luckily, Unreal Engine provides several asset libraries such as Quixel<\/a> or Twinmotion Assets for Unreal Engine<\/a> which are free to use within the Unreal ecosystem.<\/p>\n"},{"acf_fc_layout":"kaltura","video_id":"1_wdxe6n41","time":false,"start":0,"stop":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through a simple workflow to replace assets in Unreal Engine after importing an ArcGIS CityEngine Datasmith scene. The replacement workflows are controlled by Unreal Engine’s Data Assets (which can be thought of as simple tabular data). These Data Assets can be shared between projects once set up correctly.<\/p>\n

To help demonstrate the workflow, we’ve created a template project with additional tools to assist the replacements which will be explained in detail in this blog post, so you can follow along.<\/p>\n

We also provide a ready-to-use ArcGIS CityEngine and Unreal Engine sample project that makes heavy use of these replacements. To open the Unreal project, make sure the Twinmotion Content for Unreal Engine Plugin<\/a> is installed.<\/p>\n

Download<\/strong><\/span> links<\/strong><\/p>\n

CityEngine Replacement Template Project for Unreal<\/a><\/p>\n