

Technologies such as immersive virtual and augmented realities (VR, AR, often summarized as XR) allow anyone from children to city planners to understand complex designs by exploring them at real-world scales. While it has always been possible to create physical scale models of our environments, these are expensive, difficult to transport or share, and bulky to store. As various technologies such as commodity 3D CAD and photogrammetric reconstruction have matured, we are able to accurately construct virtual 3D models of our 3D world.Īt the same time as making our data more accurate, 3D models make our data more accessible. Collecting and sharing this 3D information has been, until recently, difficult and prohibitively expensive. Technology now enables us to efficiently record, model, and plot in 3D. This is because there is more information in the 3D world than 2D plans contain. The 3D data must be encoded using various tricks and conventions, such as contour lines, elevation diagrams, symbols, and shading. Reading 2D plans and maps is often challenging because they are one dimension short of the 3D world we live in. Revolutions are, however, rarely easy there are numerous issues and challenges around this transition from 2D to 3D toolchains. We introduce the principal workflows and the flexibility they afford, sketch the procedural programming language used, and discuss the export pathways available.ģD technologies are revolutionizing the way we plan, understand, communicate, and document our urban environments. Such advantages must be carefully balanced against the increased time to create and parameterize the rules and the sometimes stylistic or approximate models created coming from more traditional workflows, CityEngine’s pipeline can be initially overwhelming. Additionally, this rule-based approach means that large design spaces can be explored quickly, interactively, and analytically compared. The rule-based core of Esri’s CityEngine has some unique advantages: Huge cities can be created as easily as small ones, while the quality of the models is consistent throughout. Typical applications include processing 2D urban cartographic geographic information system (GIS) data to create a detailed 3D city model, creating a detailed visualization of a proposed development, or exploring the design space of a potential project.

It offers a flexible pipeline to transform 2D data into 3D urban models.
Sketchup models in arcscene lose texture software#
CityEngine is a rule-based urban modeling software package.
