Last Thursday evening at the CityEngine: Hollywood’s VFX Tool for Massive Cities event, I finally got to meet someone very important in my life. How important? Well ‘life changing’ important, okay not like meeting my wife and kids, but to say this person is only a small part of my life story would be disingenuous.
Upon meeting this person I couldn’t help but rather embarrassingly tell them that I regarded them as someone who had significantly affected my life. He looked embarrassed, he laughed awkwardly and generally I’m sure he thought I was quite mad.
So who was this ‘gentleman of significance’? Well his name is Pascal Mueller and he is the creator of CityEngine.

Yup if you have read this blog more than once now you get it. Before I came into contact with CityEngine I was drifting aimlessly through a career from Geographer to Planner never quite at home with it but content nonetheless. Then on a project I was working on using SketchUp I became massively lazy, many will recognise this levelness of lazy as the kind that makes you trawl the Internet for many hours, possibly days looking for a work around to a work process you have just got very tired of doing.
- I found CityEngine.
- I downloaded CityEngine.
- After a few minutes of using CityEngine and reading up about it I realised this was a game changer. No, really.
The rest is history, I’ve made a business out of CityEngine services and met a whole new generation of people getting interested in 3D urban modelling. It’s opened the door for me in the emerging academic field of Geodesign. I’ve been asked to speak at conferences about our use of CityEngine. People now specifically seek out our company for advice. Genuinely it has changed my life, it is changing my life.
The lesson here is simple: don’t think for a moment your idea for a software product is worthless, it may just change someone’s life and they may just thank you for it.
Thank you Pascal.
: ) (blushed) but i have not created CE, that was a team effort – I just started it (a decade ago)
was great meeting you in person!
soon p
Can we do navigation (Inter era or Inter building) in city engine?
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