This year, there will be more CityEngine releases than in previous years so we can deliver you new features and bug fixes quicker. First up is CityEngine 2014.0, released on the 30th of May 2014 and available for download from the customer care portal.
This version focuses on stability and interoperability with some exciting new features as well. We spent a lot of time and effort going through the various bug reports and are pleased to say that this is one of the most stable releases of CityEngine ever.
CityEngine 2014.0 key new features
Built-in Esri rule library
With the CityEngine 2013, we released the “Esri Vegetation Library with LumenRT Plants”, supporting 75 of the most common and practical genera plants/trees (realistic, compact and analytical).
We are expanding this library concept with more built-in rules such as Building, Façade, Roof and Street rules. You can easily ‘import’ these Esri base rules into your CityEngine projects or copy and modify them to suit your own needs.
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Improved donut support
This long-time requirement has been improved again. In CityEngine 2014, holes in polygons are now supported by the following CGA operations: offset, roofGable, roofHip, roofShed operations.
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Improved streets
Street creation also got some major improvements in CityEngine 2014. For an overview of what has been improved and fixed, have a look on the CityEngine resource center or on the CityEngine forum.
Unity example plugin based on the CityEngine SDK
The Esri CityEngine SDK enables 3rd party developer to integrate CityEngine’s geometry engine, the so-called Procedural Runtime into client applications. Users can develop their own procedural modeling solution, ranging from a standalone application to CityEngine plugins for commercial 3D/GIS tools. This means, developers can now take full advantage of CityEngine’s procedural capabilities without running CityEngine or ArcGIS. CityEngine is only needed to author the procedural modeling rules. Moreover, using the CityEngine SDK, you can extend CityEngine with additional import and export formats.
With this CityEngine 2014 release, we are providing you with a Unity example showing how you can embed the CityEngine SDK into the Unity game engine for native procedural geometry creation.
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Each SDK deployment requires a CityEngine license. This license can be CE advanced or CE basic. The license can be single node locked or coming from a license server. Middleware licensing will be on a case-by-case basis.
The CityEngine SDK and Unity example are available Github.
For those of you that are new to CityEngine, you can download a 30 day, full functional trial version here.
The CityEngine team
