Is it that time of year already? Yes don’t ask how close it is to Christmas! Also this week we’ve seen a new release of CityEngine, now normally I think of ‘.1’ releases as fairly minor you know for big fixes interface tweaks etc… this time however Esri’s R&D team in Zurich seem to have gone a little crazy. Support for the IFC format in this release seems a big step (and maybe reduces your need for FME software…) and one which some of our clients have been wanting. The detail now is in the workflows to use this new format support to the best ability!
On the CGA front further expansion of support for arrays is my favourite thing currently and I like the new sortIndices function which makes things a bit easier for us CityEnginers… For textures we have a ‘CGA Material Encoder’ and a new ‘readMaterial’ function.. this allows for easier and more manageable creation of textures and a new format ‘cgamat’ which can be exported. We’ll see how that works in practice in the coming months.
The next big thing is additional options for the terrain sculpting tool specifically allowing for a smooth border either by gradient or distance. This I think is brilliant if a little buggy (editing large range of terrain can cause CityEngine to freeze for a bit whilst it catches up with an edit).
Improvements in the 360VR export and dashboards are really welcomed too!
All in all a solid release, I have not had time to test out on existing projects so as always proceed with caution and back things up before trying a new software release!
To get this check your my.esri.com site or ask your system admin. As GD3D / Garsdale Design is an Esri Partner we get this a little earlier so if it’s not there wait till next week is my guess….
As always a big thank you to the ArcGIS CityEngine Developers for all their hard work.
Here’s the official release video:
- CGA Changelog is here: CGA changelog—ArcGIS CityEngine Resources | Documentation
- Python Changelog is here: Python scripting notes and changelog—ArcGIS CityEngine Resources | Documentation
- Official Release Highlights Blog: ArcGIS CityEngine 2021.1 Release Highlights (esri.com)
