CityEngine 2009 release

I have been researching solutions and approaches for modeling metropolitan areas over the last couple of years and found that none of the available solutions were ok for building form/proportion-accurate models of huge areas.

My focus is on enterprise level data use, basically providing huge data models with a lot of context and rich content. Use cases for such data are general visualization and simulation of emergency services, navigation, urban landscaping, traffic pattern projection, technical context (sewers, electricity...) ...
The modeling approach as used for developing (race) game models have a different focus on both production and asset management.

I have been watching the proceedings and research of Pascal Mueller where he demonstrated ways to define cities and buildings using a Shape Grammar. The concept appealed to me right away as it fits perfectly with my drive for modeling efficiency, data maintenance quality of service and love for the high-end MCAD parametrics techniques.
CityEngine popped up mid 2008 as a product from Procedural Inc. The company was Pascal's response to the feedback and inquiries he got from the industry. CityEngine is based on the research by Pascal Mueller (and others worldwide) at the Zurich University in defining rules to generate accurate city models. Accuracy in this context is to be taken as an attribute to the use case: photo-realism versus illustrative look and feel is a form of accuracy, neither of them being better or worse in itself but dependent on how one wants to use the graphics.

CityEngine allows you to create stunning 3D in short time and generates 3D urban environments in the architecture, urban planning, game development, television, and film industries.[1]
The procedural nature of the tool allows an almost unlimited amount of changes to the 3D data model as none of its generated meshes is static. Changing a height variable, texture assignment, color code or even changing the terrain model can be done without reverting to the tedious approaches of common 3D software. CityEngine holds these values as variables/attributes to their parent object and you can change them in 20 secs. Truly amazing ...

The new release is called "CityEngine 2009" and holds some very useful features:

• Interactive editing: a solution to revert to a more visual 'artistic' way of changing shapes when the procedural attribute changes are not providing sufficient context.
• Improved 3D capabilities: Collada export now supports instancing, overall mesh optimization
• Use of GeoSpatial data: although CE2008 already supported the OpenStreetMap data format for importing road networks, the new release now also supports the industry standard ESRI file format allowing GIS specialists to collaborate on projects without reverting to file conversion (and losing unsupported attribution).
• Improvements on street geometry generation, occlusion detection as part of the CGA shape grammar and a new Python interface on top of the strong GUI are also important innovations to mention.

CityEngine 2009 can be used for:

• Rapid Digital Prototyping
  Digital prototyping in 3D has become most important in all industries. The CityEngine provides project teams with a unique early design solution for urban environment that enables them to complete pre-visualization projects faster and with improved accuracy.
• Shorter Time-to-Market
  The procedural technology at the core of the CityEngine speeds creative design and production work so you can shorten production time, helping to gain a competitive advantage for your organization.
• Cost Reduction
  The CityEngine consists of a rich toolset for accelerating, streamlining and automatizing urban modeling processes. This results in massive cost reductions, since 3D modeling tasks can be executed faster and have not to be outsourced anymore i.e allowing for uncomplicated in-house production.
• High-Quality Content
  The quality of the 3D models is an important factor deciding about the success of projects. The CityEngine provides a full suite of industry-leading procedural tools that help artists to realize a wide range of design ideas and to deliver higher-quality 3D models of cities, buildings and streets.
• Redefine Design
  Procedural Modeling based on the CGA Shape Grammar is a groundbreaking new technology that has endless capabilities and enables never-seen-before iterative and flexible workflows allowing for efficient re-designs and fast adjustements to customer requests.
• Flawless Integration
  The CityEngine provides interoperability with all industry-standard software allowing for a flawless integration into your production pipeline.

This tool has the eyes of the industry locked and is truly my preferred tool for the last couple of months to pre-visualize my new ideas and concepts prior to bothering our internal developers for mockups. I can do my own mockups using a combination of 3DSMax, CityEngine 2009 and Virtools/Unity.

The website can be visited here.
The product brochure can be found here.

- Ihla

[1] Excerpts taken from Procedural's web site

Moving to Mac ... goodbye PC

Finally, after what seems an eternity on Windows machines, I'm moving to Mac.

For me this is a big deal: when I started my first 3D company in 1993 I was torn between Apple (Quadra) and Commodore Amiga (3000T). The latter being about 10% of the Apple investment, it didn’t take much pondering to get me an Amiga 3000T, 3D software (Imagine) and video stuff.

Since that day, I have been keeping an eye on the Mac but going forward, the market got dominated by PCs. The same was true for my clients so I went from Amiga to PC in 1996.

And now … here comes my first MacBookPro. I can only wonder about the changes that are at hand but given that my wife has been using one for about a year now, I’m already smiling

- Ihla

Introductions

Well here it is … my vent of ideas, concerns, approaches, do’s and don’t related to computer 3D imagery.

I will try to keep my focus away from the artistic 3D approach .. a trait that is getting more and more common due to massive exposure to the medium, availability of insights and training and a general feel in society that “it cannot be so difficult because the software does all the work”. Been there, done that … A lot of wannebees and pretenders are wandering this earth and the CGI industry is not spared.

Anyhow, my interest and expertise are related to large productions of 3D content, virtual/augmented realit and real time 3D for ‘business purposes’ as opposed to ‘entertainment’. So no games, no movies, no porn …

I hope you will enjoy my ramblings.

- Ihla