For example, those cities you see in the images above have coordinate systems. It’s Not All Urban DesignĪlthough this is a tool designed for urban design and planners, there is a lot of other functionality that’s overlooked. Yes, it is a tool for building cities, but it provides the means to bring them to life and give them validity. Modeling this in a conventional way would be extremely time-consuming, but using this rule-based system you can easily apply rules to govern what species live near another or how they interact. It centers around a city of animals from the smallest to the largest, each with their own style of habitat and environment. Let’s have a think about the film Zootopia. That isn’t to say you can’t, and that is what makes this so great. To date CityEngine has been used in Cars 2, Total Recall, Big Hero 6, Man of Steel, Independence Day 2, and Zootopia. But don’t think that you can just open it up and create your own film there is a fair bit of studio work that goes into turning the virtual city into what you see on screen. By using rules in this way it is easy to quickly build an entire city without having to drag out the editing tools.īuilding in this way, by using rules, is what is meant as “procedural modeling,” and it’s widely used by the film industry for creating realistic cities due to how easily convincing areas can be built, destroyed, manipulated, and recreated relatively quickly. You can do this by using rules for example, you could say that if certain buildings are x tall, then they should look like this, or you could say that if a certain area were green, then fill it with a mix of trees. How would you go about creating a 3D city from scratch? It doesn’t have to be real and can have a lot of the generic features. This is just as confusing as the term, so let’s look at it another way. What is procedural modeling? By definition, it is creating 3D models from a set of rules. So, if you read on, I’ll run through what it actually is, what it does, and why it will be useful not only to the GIS people out there but also the architects, technicians, and construction industries, too, to name only a few.
Cityengine multiple floors software#
(Yay for SLAM in mobile devices.)Īlthough in software like Unreal and Unity you can download or buy models, what do you do when you want something bespoke you have built in GIS? Or how about when you want to use a coordinate system to keep bits of your model the right distance?Īlthough I work with one of the world’s most prominent CityEngine gurus, I, like many of you, have been put off by the way it sounds and also that it is blatantly referred to as “not a GIS.” How many of you have asked what CityEngine actually is, only to hear the confusing phrase: “It’s a procedural modeling tool”? To me, that sounds like saying that GIS is a geospatial configuration and analysis tool: not very helpful to the masses.īut, here is the thing: Having used it a few times over the last few weeks, I wouldn’t be without it. These past few weeks I’ve been trying to do some clever augmented reality stuff with Unity involving putting an object on the floor and ensuring it doesn’t wobble when you walk around it.