Be sure to read the CityEngine 2024.0 release notes for all the details on new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Visit My Esri to upgrade to CityEngine 2024.0.
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Visual CGA: Procedural modeling for architects
With the new Visual CGA Editor, planers and designers can create urban designs and perform massing studies without programming skills. Node-based modelling and a carefully designed component library of architectural rules, allow for interactive development and exploration of urban designs.
The Visual CGA Editor is no longer in beta and the ESRI.lib, the CityEngine built-in content library, now contains a first set of sophisticated components for site partitioning and massing. Also, architectural rules for floors and facades are still provisional and available as early-access in the VCGA Playground example.
The example can be downloaded from within CityEngine through Download Tutorials and Examples option in the Help main menu. There are introductory examples of a massing study and an elaborate urban design based on a schematic massing imported from ArcGIS Urban.
See Visual CGA Editor for more details.
Sharing your scene online: New web scene export
Do you want to show your designs made in CityEngine to clients with little effort? With the new Share as Web Scene exporter, we offer an easy-to-use solution to share your CityEngine scene on ArcGIS Online, the cloud platform of ESRI. Users can access your scene using Scene Viewer, a state-of-the-art tool to explore 3D content in the browser. These web scenes allow for seamless accessibility to your CityEngine projects. This makes it makes easier than ever to share your designs with colleagues, stakeholders, and the public.
You can bring each scenario from your CityEngine scene into an individual web scene. This allows for easy organization, management, and sharing of your designs on ArcGIS Online.
Urban integration now support terrains
You can now use CityEngine to edit the elevation or terrain of a plan in ArcGIS Urban. The current release of ArcGIS Urban adds support for custom elevation layers per scenario. When importing an ArcGIS Urban Plan in CityEngine, these layers are automatically imported as separate terrain layers—one per scenario. You can then modify the terrain using the intuitive terrain editing tools in CityEngine so it matches your scenario perfectly. After editing the terrain, you can conveniently upload it back to your ArcGIS Urban Scenario.
New material library and material browser
Would you like to give your scenes that last finish that only hand-curated materials can? We've now added an extensive set of materials that are typically used in the urban context to ESRI.lib. They are optimized for cross media usage such as publishing on the web or in VR applications. Give them a try in CGA rules and attributes.
To simplify the selection of materials, we added a dedicated browser for materials. It allows you to iterate for the best material option quickly and intuitively. It is available for CGA attributes annotated with @MaterialFile using the Material button 
in the Inspector window.
Enhanced guides
Guides are a handy tool for precise manual modelling. With this release, we enhanced guides by making them scene objects as guides and guide layers in the Scene Editor window. For example, you can now group guides in separate layers and hide them when they are not needed. Also, guide layers can be assigned to scenarios.
You can select guides in the Viewport or the Scene Editor windows which allows you to copy, modify, and transform them as well. This gives you a whole new dimension of freedom and creativity to work with guides.
Also, we didn’t forget about the Python support for guides. This means you can programmatically create guides in the arrangement that fits your needs best.
Finally, we removed the limit of how many guides you can have in one scene.
A fresh new look: Modern selection highlight
We modernized the selection highlight in the Viewport window to enhance your workflows. The prominent outline clearly guides the focus while the subtle fill allows you to tweak your models without the need to disable the selection highlight.
Also, both the outline and the fill shine through other objects that may obscure your view of the selection. This let’s you keep track of your selection while navigating throughout the scene.
Finally, we added a highlight to the edges and vertices of shapes to clearly distinguish them from edges and faces of models. This allows you to intuitively understand what can be modified with the edit tools.
For more information on what's new in CityEngine, see the What's new in CityEngine blog and video.