It’s been awhile since I last posted we’ll yet again blame work and family commitments! This week is pretty important, it’s the week before the Esri UC in San Diego which I am returning to this year (come find me!). But the real news for me is the 2024.0 release of ArcGIS CityEngine.
Bottom line: This is the most significant release of CityEngine we have seen in a long while. Finally updates on a ‘.0’ release I can be a little excited (and nervous) about!
Has the development team in Zurich got some new staff? Or have they been given some special magic potion? Either way, we’ve got bug fixes, UI enhancements, new content, and a more development of the new (sort of*) way of create procedural geometry without having to type code a visual editor familiar to many who use other 3D tools. In addition, we also have some new tutorials on YouTube coming at a similar time to myself releasing short tutorials we’re not coordinating here, but neither are we competing so don’t worry it just means you have more learning paths available which as we all know has been an issue for CityEngine users starting out!
* yes we’ve had this for a release already in beta, plus us old timer users with CityEngine will remember a time when CE did have a visual/no code editor back in the day. The development team removed it and didn’t tell anyone is what I recall…. Please don’t do that again!
My favourite updates/new features
- New selection visuals, no massively useful but does give the view port a better feel and when selecting features amongst many other objects this really is helpful.
- Guides now treated as scene objects so we can mange them easier (and import them from other CEJ files), this has been an underused feature previously by me but I think these improvements might make it more likely that I will use it.
- Material browser! A new annotation @MaterialFile opens up a visual material browser for us in the inspector similar I guess to choosing colours via a colour picker. Now this creates grid gallery for viewing and selection. Until recently I hadn’t really used the new(ish) cgamat files to make and organise textures, but this gives me a reason!.
- VCGA I’ve got to be honest I am nervous about this, it feels very different to how I view CGA code in my head. Having said that I absolutely understand that not everyone wants to type away at a keyboard to create volumes. The amount of work Esri has put in here is amazing and will help new users come on board. CGA isn’t dead and this visual coding method has given people like me an opportunity to create ‘components’ for others to use.
Now it’s not all good news, I have some issues with the implementation of the dark mode… from what I hear it’s a windows thing, but I can’t easily switch to dark mode when select buttons are so glaringly different…
One final thing for those interested in my forthcoming release of CityEngine Pro Tools, yes so far my code works well with this new release of CityEngine naturally I am still testing it but I think we’re good!
