CityEngine 2018.0 Release Notes

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Instant quantitative visibility assessments

With CityEngine 2017.1, we introduced Visibility Tools that give you insight into what is visible in your city from a given viewpoint. In the 2018.0 release, we take this feature a step further by adding Statistics for the Viewshed and View Dome tools.

• The statistics section in the Inspector of the Viewshed or View Dome tool gives you visibility analysis of the layers in your scene. This helps to quantify visibility in your city scene.
• By expanding an entry in the layer table, you can see to what extent other layers are hiding the current layer. Additionally, the preview switches to x-ray mode and reveals the occluded geometry.
• It is now possible to create more than six Viewsheds per Analyses Layer.
• Display of graphs has been removed in the Viewshed preview.
• The preview now updates instantaneously when defining and changing layer colors.
• Fixed an issue when applying transform tools on visibility tools in group layers.
• The statistical outputs of the Viewshed and View Dome tools are also available in the Python API, allowing for elaborate visibility assessment scripts.

Collaborative feature creation in the ArcGIS platform

• CityEngine can now create and publish feature layers to ArcGIS Online.
• When accessing a feature service of an unknown portal, the feature will now be added to the list of known portals automatically. This allows the username and password for these portals to be saved in your profile as well.
• When you import a feature layer, the imported object attribute now uses the field alias as the name.
• When you create a feature layer, the object attribute name is used as the alias of the created field (however the field name is in some cases different).
• On-sync height values of scene coordinate systems that use a local height reference surface remain unchanged.
• You can now create and sync layers that are empty or set to invisible.
• We improved the handling of read only fields, such as ObjectId.
• We removed a limitation that prevented the syncing of the height of shapes with holes.

Get Map Data

• After importing a terrain using Get Map Data, CityEngine automatically frames the terrain data in th 3D Viewport.
• At a high zoom level in the Get Map Data dialog, the extent is sometimes invisible. We fixed this by zooming out the view automatically so that the extent is completely visible.

Scenarios

We refined the UX of Scenarios in CityEngine, to make it easier to use and meet your requirements better:

• The scenario buttons in the Scene Editor are draggable so that you can put them in order as you wish.
• We extended the length of the Scenario ID to four characters that now allows for year dates, for example.
• Next to the scenarios in the scene editor, we added a "plus" button to easily add a new scenario to the scene.
• You can now right-click on the scenario buttons to duplicate, mirror, edit, or delete a scenario directly.
• CityEngine correctly adds scenarios to the current scene when importing a CityEngine scene file with scenarios.

Unreal support

• The Unreal "Datasmith" Exporter and the CityEngine template project have been upgraded to support Unreal Engine 4.19 (using Datasmith SDK 0.18). We will keep our Unreal exporter in beta state until the Epic Datasmith SDK itself exits beta (expected Q3 2018).
• The Unreal exporter has two additional export options to control object granularity and asset instancing.
• Fixed several bugs with the Unreal exporter to eliminate memory leaks and to avoid hitting the "maximum number of objects" limit in Unreal.

3D Viewport, navigation and camera bookmarks

• View the viewport full screen through the context menu.
• Generating the model hierarchy of large rules is faster and more robust.
• The terrain wireframe is now visible behind transparent scene objects.
• Fixed a regression in the rotate tool. In the Object Coord mode, multiple Objects now rotate correctly.
• Fixed a bug with Intel graphics in the viewport snapshot that caused black images.
• To increase compatibility on Intel MacOS devices, multisample anti-aliasing is now off by default.
• Fixed an issue where intensive scrolling caused white artifacts in the viewport or the screen to freeze.
• We removed visible seam lines in the rendering of the reflection map.

CGA language and editor

• The new insertAlongUV operation has been added. This allows you to read a geometry asset (3D model, polygon mesh) from a file and inserts it along the current shape's uv coordinates by mapping the width and depth of the asset to the chosen uv-set.
• Added the assetNamingInfo function which returns a list of group or material names of an asset. This is useful for component splits by material or group names.
• CGA Handles now adjust to implicit unit ranges of @Angle, @Distance and @Percent.
• We optimized the size of CGA move handles.
• We improved the highlighting of warning and errors in the CGA Editor.
• Handles are now unavailable when the shape layer is locked.

Import of GIS data, models and terrain

• Fixed a bug with the Collada importer to correctly read multiple UV sets.
• Fixed a regression in the static model import leading to a missing asset file path.
• Implemented various stability improvements to the Get Map Data importer.
• Improved the precision of the terrain positioning on import.
• Fixed an issue where high resolution textures on terrains with no data areas created "waterfall like" or "skirt" artifacts.
• Importing of a 16-bit single channel DEM data doesn't clip the highest values anymore.

Export of 3D Models and GIS features

• We now support the Geotiff format which is the default option when exporting terrains.
• The FBX exporter now has fallback behavior to write face vertex normals if the actual vertex normals are missing.
• In the FGDB Export Dialog, you can specify whether to export all, none, or the sum of the report variables.
• The terrain exporter now honors the measurement unit of the scene coordinate system.

Python API

• We added a new method ce.exit() to support proper shutdown of CityEngine from within a Python script.
• The Python console now correctly reports errors in interactively entered scripts.
• Get/setLayerPreferences now use standard formatting for defining layer colors.
• Fixed a null pointer exception in ce.selection() that was triggered by deleting selected models.
• It is now possible to define no texture on terrain import through ce.addAttributeLayer().
• Fixed a missing georeference issue when importing 8-bit terrains.
• Resolved an issue in the import for gdb, where the set spacial envelope part of data setImportQueryAndEnvelope() was ignored.

General improvements and changes

• The compilers used in the CityEngine SDK have been upgraded. Clients that are maintaining custom importers/exporters are now able to use the full C++14 feature set. See the release page  https://github.com/Esri/esri-cityengine-sdk/releases on github for details.
• The system requirements have been upgraded:
  • RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 (and binary compatible distributions like CentOS 7) is the minimally supported Linux version.
  • macOS version 10.12 is the minimally supported version.
• The allocation of resources, such as texture sizes and frame buffers has been reorganised and centralised in a global resource manager for the render core. This leads to less reallocation and more efficient memory use that can improve the render quality and performance.
• CityEngine is now available in Simplified Chinese.
• In the Inspector on Linux sliders are no longer drawn over an open combo dropdown.
• Addressed an instability issue in the Windows ATI driver triggered by certain texture dimensions.
• On Windows it is now possible to silently install and license CityEngine from the command line.
• Resolved a multi-selections issue where rule attributes for all selected objects aren't set correctly when there is an existing desired value.
• The selection is now maintained when toggling the layer visibility.
• Improved the robustness of the CGA Style Manager towards start shapes with holes.
• Fixed an issue where shape cleanup did not handle holes correctly.
• Fixed a hanger on borrowing a license in the ArcGIS Administrator for macOS.
• Now when the currently set style doesn't exist on the rule file assignment, the style resets to Default style. Additionally the reset attributes button does reset styles.
• The cut/copy/paste key bindings in the Navigator search bar now work.

Documentation improvements

• Added documentation on startup.py in the special python scripts section to automate repetitive CityEngine tasks.
• Extended the Tutorial 10 download to provide a workflow for CityEngine automation.
• We added handles to the NYC2259 example to adjust the building height and improve facade selection.
• Added support for the insertion of windows in the Sternwarte example for small wall tiles.