Archive notice: This article was originally published on May 19, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
While digital modeling of cities and buildings has until now been time-consuming, CityEngine promises a remedy. Thanks to the software’s procedural technology, building and city designs can be modeled and varied among themselves. Time-consuming city modeling will soon be a thing of the past, and increasingly realistic urban models will find their way onto consoles, cinema screens and displays.
Consumers of games, films and other entertainment media expect ever more spectacular content today. Impressive cities and detailed buildings often play an important dramatic role. Current console titles such as GTA IV show this very clearly. At the same time, competition demands that producers continually optimize production resources in order to combine competitive efficiency with outstanding visual output quality.
Swiss software maker Procedural Inc. offers CityEngine as an innovative answer to these challenges. CityEngine creates buildings and entire cities up to 10 times faster than any currently available method, for an investment of nearly US$7,000. This is made possible through procedural modeling. Once defined, buildings automatically adapt in type, size and placement on plots. Buildings can be varied easily. The proportion and rhythm of building volumes and façades are retained. Building designs can be mixed to create even more convincing variations. Numerous templates are included.
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Automatic generation of road networks and city plans completes the procedural city-generation process. Presets enable a quick start. Using metadata such as population density or mix of uses, users can very easily control the distribution of building designs across the city. A virtual Manhattan can be generated with just a few mouse clicks. Urban scenarios are output through contemporary standard formats such as FBX, Collada, RenderMan, mental ray and Wavefront .obj. Large scenes can be processed in batch mode.
The software was publicly presented for the first time on 6 May 2008 at FMX after years of development at the internationally renowned ETH Zurich. The CityEngine workshop, the stand at fmx/08 and the live online broadcast all attracted strong interest.
Company founder Pascal Müller is pleased with the positive response. According to him, major companies from the game and film industries as well as architectural visualization have shown strong interest in CityEngine, so several software licenses had already been sold before the official release. Renowned universities, practicing archaeologists, matte painters and experts in “automotive visualization” also underlined strong demand.
CityEngine will be available as a free 30-day trial at http://www.procedural.com from 23 May 2008.
Further links:
- Free 30-day CityEngine trial from 23 May 2008 at
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