CityEngine 2019.1 Release Notes

 

Visit My Esri to upgrade to CityEngine 2019.1. Are you new to CityEngine? Try it now with a fully functional free trial version.

Interactive design tools

Guides

• Guides are now available as a separate tool in the main menu and toolbar. The guide creation was a feature within each of the drawing tools in previous releases.
• You can create guides based on an edge similarly as in the last version. Additionally, guides can be created at a defined distance to an edge by either snapping to a vertex or by specifying an exact offset in the numeric input field.
• Guides support the planar drawing mode in the same way as the other drawing tools.
• Guides now have improved visual representations that are more distinguishable from the background.  
• Guides now shine through geometry in cases of intersections. This helps to better understand the location and orientation of guides in 3D. 
• Fixed a bug in which the guides temporarily disappeared during navigation in the Viewport. 

Drawing tools

• The previous release introduced the planar drawing mode (press T while using a drawing tool). The cursor icon now contains an indicator to clearly show the active drawing mode. 
• The polygonal drawing tool now closes the polygon with a double-click. 
• Fixed a bug in the polygonal drawing tool in which shape creation failed in some cases with overlapping arcs. 
• Fixed a bug in which after undoing an arc, the tangent handle pointed in the wrong direction.  
• The polygonal drawing tools now yield more robust results as the creation of very small segments is prevented.  
• When using the circle drawing tool, the preview shape is now filled. This helps to better understand where the new circle will intersect with surrounding geometry.  
• A bug has been fixed in which snapping to invisible edges (of the triangulated geometry) erroneously occurred.  
• Instead of a distinct first and a second click, the circle and rectangle drawing tools now work as expected when you perform click and drag action. The polygonal drawing tool has been updated to behave similarly.
• A bug has been fixed in which switching between tools and using undo caused an error.  
• Closing a scene while drawing a polygonal shape no longer causes an error.  
• An issue has been fixed in which rotating a bookmark did not work as expected.  
• Fixed a bug in the polygonal drawing tool in which undo on overlapping segments behaved wrong.
• Fixed a bug in the polygonal drawing tool in which an invalid laserline was shown when doing push/pull operations.
• Fixed an issue that caused errors while drawing streets.

Import and export of 3D data

Unreal exporter

• Exported CityEngine models can now be imported into any Unreal Studio project as CityEngine now also writes shaders. Consequently, the CityEngine Model Loader template is no longer needed.
• The terrain heightmap is no longer rescaled randomly.  
• The exporter is now based on the Unreal 4.23 Datasmith SDK.  
• The absence of UV sets is now handled correctly.  
• Fixed precision issue with instances.
• Fixed file name legalizer bug, which created "_png" instead of ".png" in the file name.
• Optimized the export of instances with different materials.  
• The exporter now checks the opacity map pixels to set the default transparency mode (opaque or blend or masked) for best rendering performance.  

Scene layer package (SLPK) exporter

• The SLPK exporter now writes the i3s 1.7 format, which supports PBR (physically based rendering) materials and has better loading performance.
• Memory consumption with many/large textures has been reduced and the texture atlas composition has improved. Additionally, the texture sizes within the atlas have improved.
• Added support for PBR materials.
• Added support for Domains for Boolean attributes.
• Removed texture quality option and replaced it with a new option to control the resulting file size.
• Fixed the handling of PNG textures. This makes the resulting scene layers compatible with Portal for ArcGIS 10.7.
• Improved screen size heuristic (for LOD switching in viewers).
• Improved handling of degenerated texture coordinates.
• Fixed an issue that caused wrong materials in intermediate levels.
• Fixed a bug in "Features per leaf shape" that crashed in some cases if reports were emitted.
• Fixed an issue in which temporary files were not deleted from disk.
• Fixed a bug that caused crashes if the resulting SLPK file was too large.
• Fixed bugs that caused errors in ArcGIS Pro.

FileGDB exporter

• The FileGDB exporter now puts all mesh triangle polygons into triangle multipatch parts.  

Import

• Fixed an issue in which importing an OBJ file caused an error. 
• Improved importing nongeoreferenced 3D data with drag and drop or the dialog so the resulting position of the model is more intuitive. This prevents the "Object is too far away for scene content". errors in many cases.  

Integration with ArcGIS Urban

• ArcGIS Urban contents can now be accessed from the Navigator:
  • Added an ArcGIS Urban tab that lists the projects and plans in the ArcGIS Urban installation.
  • You can now open a project or plan for editing in CityEngine with the context menu. A warning is displayed when trying to select an ArcGIS Urban item that might not be supported by the current version of CityEngine.
  • You can open plans and projects for viewing in the browser in the ArcGIS Urban web app by double-clicking the items.
• ArcGIS Urban parcels are now supported in the Inspector:
  • Added support for ArcGIS Urban attributes such as building type or space use.
  • The attributes of the Zoning and Overlay layers in ArcGIS Urban are now sampled on the parcels in CityEngine.
  • You can now apply rules from ESRI.lib in CityEngine to re-create plausible building models and zoning envelopes configured and generated in ArcGIS Urban.
• Better sync between ArcGIS Urban and CityEngine:
  • On import, unsupported characters are now removed from names of plans and projects.
  • Fixed a bug in which a missing update of attribute fields caused wrong numbers to display in ArcGIS Urban.
  • Fixed an issue in which undo operations on shapes caused inconsistencies when syncing back to ArcGIS Urban.
  • Fixed a bug in which a parcel that was not part of a zone failed to sync with ArcGIS Urban.
  • ArcGIS Urban users without publishing permission now receive an error message when attempting to publish a model as an Urban scene layer.

Procedural modeling language (CGA)

• Arrays can now be declared as attr or const, and they can be explicitly initialized. Like all CGA attributes, you can modify array attributes in the Inspector and connect them to object attributes of the matching type.
• Rule package (RPK) creation:
  • Fixed a bug in which cancelling the export of an RPK file caused errors in which temporary files were deleted incorrectly. 
  • Fixed an issue in which the RPK export with Python didn't yield the same result as when exported with the user interface. 
  • Fixed an export crash that happened randomly.  
• Fixed various issues in the CGA Compiler including enhanced response time, improved error and warning messages, improved unused warnings, information on deprecated usages and misspelled annotations, correct handling of recursive definitions, and detection of recursions without stop criterion.
• A warning is now issued by the compiler when annotation names are misspelled (wrong lower/upper case); or if deprecated annotations, functions, or operations are used.
• Fixed a bug that caused a crash when the maximum recursion level for functions was set too high.
• Improved the performance of inter context/occlusion queries in cases in which many shapes are involved.
• Fixed an issue with an incorrect resulting roof height in the roofShed operation.
• The getObjectAttr function (available for layer attributes) has been deprecated. Use the new functions getFloatObjectAttr, getStringObjectAttr or getBoolObjectAttr instead.
• Fixed a bug in which error markers in the layer attribute CGA code didn't disappear when the errors were resolved.
• See the CGA changelog for a comprehensive list of changes.

Miscellaneous improvements

• Viewport:
  • Clicking a single object that is part of a multiselection now cancels the multiselection and selects the clicked object. 
  • When assigning a rule file to a shape with drag and drop, the shape gets selected automatically. This ensures that assigning a rule file always results in a clear visual feedback.  
  • Newly generated models are now added to a selection if the connected shape is selected.
  • Navigation using arrow keys is now more consistent.  
• Help, tutorials and examples:
  • Online CityEngine help is now directly accessible with the F1 key.
  • Offline CGA and Python Reference are now directly accessible from the help menu. 
  • Offline CGA Reference now contains links to new CityEngine online help.  
  • Legacy CGA annotations such as @Range and @Enum have been updated in all examples and tutorials.  
  • Tutorial 15 has been improved.  
• To improve the usability of CityEngine on high-dpi screens, multiple UI elements have been updated or their upscaling improved:
  • The numeric input field and icons in the toolbar.    
  • The Login Status menu in the toolbar.
  • The slider for numeric input fields in the Inspector. 
  • The More Tabs drop-down menu next to multiple CGA files.
  • The icons and check boxes used in the Scene Editor, Navigator, and Log.
  • The head-up display in the Viewport.  
  • The CGA and Viewshed handles in the Viewport.  
• The delay when opening the Get map data dialog has significantly lessened. 
• Added an option to automatically trigger model generation after import to the Get map data dialog. This option is turned on by default. 
• "Edited" indicators for open files are more consistent to better understand which files contain unsaved changes or are already saved. 
• You can now manipulate a model by editing the components of its initial shape and see how this affects the reported data in the dashboard interactively.
• The text input widgets for "Create new scene" and "Export Layer as .cej" are no longer case sensitive. This means new file names must differ by at least one character from existing ones.  
• Fixed a bug in which the Align to Terrain option was disabled for static models.
• Fixed a bug in which cutting (Ctrl+X) the heightmap file path in the terrain Inspector caused an error.
• Attribute sampling for shapes now considers shapes of the same scenario only. 
• Attribute sampling for shapes now considers holes in shapes. 
• The Model Hierarchy view now supports CGA array attributes.  
• Fixed a bug that caused a long delay before the first building models show up after clicking Finish in the City Wizard.  
• Fixed an issue in which check boxes are rendered as black bars in the Per Layer Options export dialog. 
• Fixed a bug in which multiple entries in the Shape menu were set as active when specific editors were focused. 
• Updated the animation next to the Generate button to run smoother.  
• The Generate button and its corresponding entry in the main menu are now disabled when a shape isn't selected.  
• Fixed a bug in which the ESRI.lib manager failed to open.  
• Extended the internationalization support in the import dialogs.    
• Fixed a bug on Linux in which only one link could be opened in an external browser.  
• Application icons now have correct resolution on a Linux/Gnome desktop.
• The CityEngine icon was redesigned.