Okay I hope I got you with a bit of a click-bait headline (hey others do it)! The current CityEngine version is 2018.1 but we know 2019.0 won’t be far away… so what do we know is coming in the next release and when? This post highlights publicly available knowledge about the next release of Esri CityEngine 2019.0. The real sneak peek of CE 2019.0 comes at 15:27 on the Master Planning & Architectural Site Design with CityEngine from Pascal Mueller video below. It talks in quite a bit of detail on the ArcGIS Urban integration as well which is a really interesting direction.

2019.0 Release

  • Release Date: Uncertain but possibly June/July 2019
  • New Feature – ArcGIS Urban Integration
  • New Feature – GLTF support? (you can see this from their Esri JS apps which include support for GLTF)
  • Extended Unreal Studio visualisation capabilities (through updates to datasmith exports and improvements to template apps)
  • CityEngine $100 for non-commercial use (included for Personal Use and ArcGIS for Student Use which includes AGOL subscription)
  • CityEngine Procedural Runtime SDK license changes – free for in-house development / new Houdini and Maya plugins free for non-commercial use
Snapshot from video embedded below.

Roadmap potential development roadmap

The real interesting thing here is the design optimisation (automated) which lots of people think Esri CityEngine can do already…

  • New Feature – Sketching and sculpting tools specifically for site design
  • New Feature – Design optimisation with machine learning (prototype demo at end of video below 48:34)
  • New Feature – 2D plan outputs
  • New Feature – CityEngine VR / Urban XR Experience (integrated with CityEngine and ArcGIS Urban)


Master Planning & Architectural Site Design with CityEngine

Geodesign Summit video on Esri CityEngine and ArcGIS Urban

Lastly if you want to know where CityEngine is taking GIS and the Esri platform watch this video below, and particularly pay attention to Pascal talking at the end about streaming in ArcGIS Online terrain/basemaps into Unreal and the demo (about 43:42).