I have been working on some CityEngine rules and updating them for use in the latest release. I thought it would be good to make a demo project combining lots of rules together in some kind of cohesive ‘thing’, this I have called ‘Howgill City’. This is some of the outputs from that. I am using Twinmotion for this and yes you will notice some Animal City models here ..read more

ArcGIS CityEngine 2022.1 Splash Screen This last month has been a bit hectic, do not worry it has all been good and busy with CityEngine knowledge transfer and project support for a couple of big clients. You see CityEngine (and you will know this if you read this blog occasionally) is fantastic for fast iteration over master plans for urban areas. What’s really nice is seeing that 3D model of an area produce metrics (reports) that we can export to a CSV for use in downstream work of the initial designs. CityEngine’s flexibility is its strength and the clients I’ve worked with use a variety of ..read more

Everyone is doing game engines these days it feels like. I think basically once we in the built environment professions started talking about digital twins the idea that current geospatial and CAD systems could cope with the sheer amount of visualisation required, disappeared! Convergence of various professional’s outputs on game engines like Unreal or Unity is now all but inevitable. Tools like CityEngine help me get in that world and take GIS data and publish into a game environment relatively easily. One day I expect GIS and associated tools will just be a subset of tools/functionality to a ..read more

Oooo another new splash screen! 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 gettin ..read more

Is it that time of year already? Yes don’t ask how close it is to Christmas! Also this week we’ve seen a new release of CityEngine, now normally I think of ‘.1’ releases as fairly minor you know for big fixes interface tweaks etc… this time however Esri’s R&D team in Zurich seem to have gone a little crazy. Support for the IFC format in this release seems a big step and one which some of our clients have been wanting. The detail now is in the workflows to use this new format support to the best ability! On the CGA front further expansion of support for arrays is my favourite thing currentl ..read more

Another Esri job based in Redlands, CA (USA) “Are you passionate about applying GIS in urban planning and design? A self-starter and problem solver with an entrepreneurial mindset? In the past few years, Esri has put a large effort into making design tools accessible and powerful for experts, stakeholders, and the public for the smartest cities in the world such as Dubai, Boston, and Singapore. We are dedicated to continually pushing the boundaries of urban design and planning, and you can play a key role in our mission. Our fast-growing team works closely with customers as well as across our ..read more

Yup I’ve been busy doing other things so haven’t posted for a while. Recently I have tried to make time for myself on a Friday to learn new techniques or workflows related to my work in geospatial/planning/3D etc… Last week I decided to follow one of John Nelson’s excellent short tutorials. I am a big fan of his videos professional and relaxed with good humour: click here, do this, do that, and don’t be afraid to experiment seems a good strategy for me and definitely one I follow in anything CityEngine related! Not everything came out perfectly when I made the tile packages for ArcGIS Online c ..read more

As the occasional side project in my downtime I like to experiment with the creation of different geometries in CityEngine. A while back I started think about spaceships and had fun doing Blakes7 Liberator inspired ships. You can read about those here. Adding more detail I think my CityEngine version looks okay… it would need rendering properly outside of CityEngine though! Anyway I’ve started doing other ship types and some of you may have seen my twitter posts… Yup I’ve done Federation type Star Trek things….. as you can see below it’s one rule file and you can then interact with the rule ..read more

A new CityEngine release is always a reason to celebrate for me, especially on a ‘big’ version release day. So here we are at the end of May beginning of June and we finally have the 2021 version of ArcGIS CityEngine (Esri Partners get access to release a little early if you are wondering why the download option isn’t available to you yet). None of this is secret you can see on the ArcGIS CityEngine help site that these features are now listed. Should you download it well read on! Remember CityEngine versions can be installed alongside each other so there’s no reason not to install it. The usu ..read more

Continuing my adventure (read more here) with the iPhone12 Pro and its pretty special 3D scanning capabilities I scanned some ‘trig points’ on the hills above Sedbergh (The Howgills). My first one was the trig point on Winder which sits above our town… for this I used Scaniverse. Hosted of course on the excellent Sketchfab. Lovely scan, soon to be in ArcGIS Pro The post iPhone scan: Winder Trig Point appeared first on GeoPlanIT ..read more