CityEngine Alternatives

CityEngine Overview

CityEngine is a standalone software that provides professional users in entertainment, architecture, urban planning, GIS and general 3D content production with a unique conceptual design and modeling solution for the efficient creation of 3D cities and buildings.

The key highlights of CityEngine include:

GIS/CAD Data Support

CityEngine supports industry-standard formats such as ESRI Shapefile or DXF which allow to import/export any geo-spatial/vector data such as parcels, building footprints with arbitrary attributes, or line data to create street networks.

OpenStreetMap Import

To copy real cities or efficiently create an urban environment for your design, you can use data from OpenStreetMap. There you can download for free geospatial data of real cities and directly import it into CityEngine.

Dynamic City Layouts

An intuitive toolset is provided to interactively design, edit and modify urban layouts consisting of (curved) streets, blocks and parcels. Street construction or block subdivision is controlled via parametric interfaces, giving immediate visual feedback.

Street Networks Patterns

CityEngine offers unique street grow tools to quickly design and construct urban layouts. Street patterns such as grid, organic or circular are available and the topography of the terrain is taken into account.

Rule-based Modeling Core

Procedural modeling based on CGA rules offers unlimited possibilities to control mass, geometry assets, proportions, or texturing of buildings or streets on a city-wide scale. You can define your own rules using your own textures/models in the node- or text-based rule editor.

Facade Wizard

Quickly create rules out of an image or a textured mass model with this simple and easy-to-use visual facade authoring tool. The resulting facade rules are size-independent, contain level-of-detail and can be extended with e.g. detailed window asset.

Parametric Modeling Interface

A convenient interface to interactively control specific street or building parameters such as the height or age (defined by the rules) is provided. And with the live mode, parameter modifications invoke the automatic regeneration of the 3D model.

Map-Controlled City Modeling

Any parameter of the buildings and streets can be controlled globally via image maps (for example the building heights or the landuse-mix). This allows for intuitive city modeling and quick changes on a city-wide scale. Furthermore, terrains can be imported, aligned, and exported.

Industry-Standard 3D Formats

CityEngine supports Collada, Autodesk® FBX®, 3DS, Wavefront OBJ and e-on software's Vue, which allow for flawless 3D data exchange. FBX® and Collada support asset instancing, multiple UV-sets, grouping and binary encoding. Furthermore, scenes can also be exported to RenderMan® RIB or mental ray® MI format. Textures can be collected during (batch) export.

Reporting (BIM for Cities)

Customized rule-based reports can be generated to analyze the urban design e.g. automatically calculate quantities such as GFA, FAR, etc. Reports are updated automatically and instantaneously and can be made for whole city parts.

Python

Streamline repetitive or pipeline-specific tasks with the integrated Python scripting interface e.g. write out arbitrary meta-data or instancing information for each building, import FBX® cameras etc.

Training Materials & Provided Examples

Whether you're an architect, urban planner, GIS professional, game developer, or CG artist, several learning videos and tutorials demonstrate you the basics and key concepts of CityEngine. Included are demo cities of ancient, contemporary and future cities at different levels of detail.

Available for All Platforms

CityEngine is available for Windows (32/64bit), Mac OSX (64bit), and Linux (32/64bit). As licensing model you can choose between node-locked or floating licenses (including license borrowing).

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