{"id":4199,"date":"2018-10-05T15:35:10","date_gmt":"2018-10-05T15:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/?p=4199"},"modified":"2019-04-15T20:40:14","modified_gmt":"2019-04-15T20:40:14","slug":"a-helping-handle-visual-cues-for-my-rules-in-esri-cityengine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/?p=4199","title":{"rendered":"A helping handle & visual cues for my rules in Esri CityEngine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometimes in CityEngine it can be hard to figure out what’s going on.  Whether that’s understanding scope (CityEnginers understand this can get complicated) or just simple metrics.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Down the CityEngine rabbit hole I go again…..<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I’ll often use a combination of ‘print’ and ‘report’ to give me a better understanding of my code at any given point.  What I also do is use bright colours (which have simple RGB\/hex colour codes) to indicate whether a part of the code has been reached.  once I’ve confirmed it works I continue the code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Bright colours can show you interesting metrics but also when you’ve screwed up…<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Recently I’ve been working on some code where an understanding of the orientation of an model is important, not just as a world orientation but also relative to the initial shapes scope.  As is the case with most of my work in CityEngine I start to wonder, how would I go about making something more visual for me?   Thus I decided to spend some (okay probably too much!) time creating a procedural protractor.  This allows you to switch between displaying an angle relative to the shapes scope, or the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Any excuse to use an animated GIF…<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I’ve used the Handle features in CityEngine to make interacting with the attributes associated with this rule simple.  I’m starting to use ‘handles’ in CityEngine to expose attributes for users in a friendlier way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To sum up for me I’ve found that programming language in Esri CityEngine called Computer Generated Architecture (CGA) is easier to pick up than traditionally programming languages because it is a visual one and by that I mean you create geometries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes in CityEngine it can be hard to figure out what’s going on.  Whether that’s understanding scope (CityEnginers understand this can get complicated) or just simple metrics.   I’ll often use a combination of ‘print’ and ‘report’ to give me a better understanding of my code at any given point.  What I also do is use […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":4203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[93,116,145,64,156,7,16,9],"tags":[351],"class_list":["post-4199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-3d","category-city-creation","category-cityengine","category-esri","category-geodesign","category-gis","category-visualisations","category-workflow","tag-cityengine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4199"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4851,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4199\/revisions\/4851"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}