Guides: Enhanced functionality
- Guides are now scene objects that belong to guide layers.
- All layer functionalities, such as visibility and color adjustments, are now applicable to guide layers.
- You can now select guides in the Viewport window.
- You can now move, rotate and scale guides using the transform tools.
- Removed the limit on the number of guides in the scene.
- You can import guides into other scenes using the .cej importer.
- Added Python support for guides and guide layers.
Revamped selection highlight
- Completely revamped and modernized the selection highlight to enhance the user experience.
- Added an outline around selected objects to quickly identify selected parts.
- Adjusted colors for lead and normal selections in new scenes for better contrast.
- Selected objects are now shining through occluding objects.
Streets and other tools
- Improved the performance of object selection and snapping has been enhanced.
- Fixed a bug in the Terrain Smooth Brush tool in which low strength settings had no effect.
- Fixed a bug when drawing a street intersection; the selected rule file was not assigned to the intersection shape.
- Fixed a bug in which the Convert Models to Shapes tool would return an invalid shape, particularly when applied to models that have less than three vertices on their faces.
3D navigation and rendering
- Fixed a bug in which the rotation center of the camera did not get updated correctly when in parallel projection mode.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Viewport window to get stuck when zooming with the mouse wheel.
- Fixed a bug that caused a Viewport window failure when deleting a shape with a hole.
- Fixed a bug that caused shadows and ambient occlusion to render incorrectly in scenes that have a view corridor and terrain.
- Implemented various rendering performance improvements, such as implementing hardware instancing for native assets.
- Fixed a bug in which adding shapes with more than one face to the current selection resulted in a incorrect lead selection.
- The Viewport window now supports the doubleSided material attribute. You can use the Force Backface Culling option under the View settings to force backface-culling on all faces, see RenderSettings for more information.
- Improved precision for rendering textures with texture coordinate transformations.
Materials and Material Browser
- Added a library of carefully designed materials to ESRI.lib.
- In the Inspector window, CGA attributes annotated with the new @MaterialFile annotation can now be edited with the new Material Browser.
- The Material Browser displays previews of all materials (.cgamat files) in ESRI.lib in a grid-like gallery that allows for testing and assigning a material (file path) to an attribute.
Inspector
- Creating or deleting styles in rule files that are read-only (ESRI.lib) are no longer offered in the Inspector window. Previously, this led to errors.
- Fixed a bug that slowed down scrolling large arrays in the Inspector window.
Accessibility
- Improved text tooltips colors in the Navigator window for better accessibility.
- Improved background colors for text input fields in the Inspector window for better accessibility.
- Improved the background color of the CGA code completion menu for better accessibility.
- Icon colors in the Window main menu are now adapted for better accessibility based on the selected theme.
- Enhanced dialog accessibility by adjusting various UI elements.
Dark mode and SVG icons
- Improved dark mode support for various UI components including menus, menu bar, dialogs boxes window bar, or buttons, as well as for the ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise sign-in windows.
- Improved dialog information that prompts the user to restart CityEngine for the theme changes to take effect.
- Enhanced theme switching for a smoother experience.
- Adapted various UI components in dialog boxes to better adhere to the dark mode.
- Improved check box styling in dialog boxes.
- Improved margins in the Scene Light and Panorama tool.
- Added a new SVG icon for a CGA material file.
- Fixed a bug that caused icons to be black.
- Fixed a bug in which check boxes were indicating incorrect toggle states.
- Fixed a bug in which unused attributes were not grayed-out consistently in dark mode.
Miscellaneous UI Improvements
- The Welcome View now has a news section to inform users about events and new releases.
- Keyboard inputs work again in the Welcome View. This allows you to reopen the previous opened scene by pressing Enter.
- Fixed a bug in which an orange highlight was shown for shapes when the user tried to assign a CGA rule using drag-and-drop when the shape was locked.
- Fixed a bug in the Navigator window in which empty entries were added to the file tree when scene files were moved to a new directory.
- Fixed a bug in the Navigator window in which the combo box next to the search field was too narrow to show the entire entry.
- Fixed a bug in which downloading tutorials and examples or updating ESRI.lib did not work when the certificate was trusted.
- Fixed a bug in which the Download Tutorials and Examples dialog box opened at an unexpected location on the screen.
- Added a tooltip to the sign-in icon in the menu bar that now shows the name of the current user logged in.
- Improved the contrast of various UI elements in the dialog boxes.
- Updated the icons in the Log and Console windows.
- Fixed a bug that caused an error in the Log window when clicking the Installation Details button in the About CityEngine window.
- Fixed a bug that caused a warning in the Log window when switching workspaces.
- Fixed a bug in which setting the focus to the tab of certain views didn't focus the view's contents. Most prominently, the Visual CGA Editor didn't allow pasting the clipboard contents after clicking its tab.
- Fixed a bug in which the focus was not fully set on a view when directly clicking the editable fields.
Integration with ArcGIS Urban: Added support for terrains
- You can now import a terrain from an ArcGIS Urban Scenario.
- You can now select a terrain and publish it to an ArcGIS Urban Scenario.
- Improved the ordering and grouping of the layers for ArcGIS Urban plan imports.
- ArcGIS Urban scenes now have a Zoning Envelopes layer.
- You can now publish scene layers to ArcGIS Urban plans in local coordinates.
- Fixed a bug that prevented publishing models to an ArcGIS Urban Scene Layer on ArcGIS Enterprise portals.
- Fixed a bug that caused missing a heightmap on import from ArcGIS Enterprise portals.
Sharing web scenes made easy
- We added a simple way to share a CityEngine scene as a web scene in Scene Viewer.
- Bookmarks in CityEngine are now translated into slides in Scene Viewer for simplified navigation.
Get Map Data and OpenStreetMap import
- The user now has more fine-grained options to control graph simplification, see Simplify graphs for more information. This is especially helpful when importing streets from OpenStreetMap (OSM) using Get Map Data.
- The improved Simplify Graph tool now runs by default for OSM imports using Get Map Data.
- Using the default options in the OSM importer no longer imports streets tagged as *_link.
- The OSM importer no longer creates shapes for streets that are marked as tunnels by default.
- The OSM importer now only creates sidewalks where specified by the data.
- Fixed a bug in which extents just east of the 180° E/W longitude could not be selected.
Import and export
GLTF
- Linear color factors in glTF are now correctly converted from linear to non-linear color space on import and vice-versa on export.
- Added support to the glTF importer for data URIs with mime type application/gltf-buffer.
- Fixed a crash in the glTF exporter on faces with less than three vertices.
FBX
- Added support for normal maps to the FBX importer.
- The FBX importer now falls back to the first UV set when the FBX file contains a broken mapping between mesh and texture.
IFC
- Extended the IFC importer to read IFC version 4 files.
USD
- Added support for texture coordinate transformations in the USD exporter and importer.
DWG
- Fixed a bug that exported the same texture multiple times.
KML
- Fixed a bug in which importing a KML file into a scene with a non-meter coordinate system resulted in the wrong vertical placement.
TPK
- Fixed a bug in which Tile Package exports of terrains with very high resolution resulted in bad accuracy.
Miscellaneous import and export
- Fixed a bug in which zero-area holes were created when choosing the Triangulate faces with holes option.
- Fixed a bug in which some options in the model exporters were enabled when they should have been disabled.
- Fixed a bug in which check boxes showed an artefact in the export dialogs on Linux.
CGA: Changes and bug fixes
- A Visual CGA Design (*.vcga) can now be imported. You can call its start rule and override its attributes and extension nodes in the import statement.
- Made improvements to maintain the topology and tags of input geometries: The setback, setbackToArea, setbackPerEdge, shapeLUO, splitAndSetbackPerimeter operations now keep collinear vertices on the resulting setback edges. The convexify operation maintains the topology of the input geometry and preserves existing component tags. The resulting convex polygons are now fully connected.
- The geometry.isConcave function now consistently classifies collinear vertices as convex.
- The uv rotation center of texture channels (rw material attribute) was changed from (0.5, 0.5) to (0,0).
- Linux: Fixed a crash in readStringTable and readFloatTable functions when reading a non-existing table.
- Fixed a bug in which uv offset values for the setupProjection operation were not correctly considered.
- Fixed a bug in which the @Hidden annotation for an import statement was incorrectly handled.
- The Building_From_Footprint.cga file in ESRI.lib was updated to work with the new convexify CGA command.
See the CGA changelog for a comprehensive list of changes and bug fixes.
CGA Editor
- Fixed a bug in which the refactoring of import statements was performed incorrectly when a rule file was renamed or moved.
VCGA Editor
- Visual CGA, a new node-based programming interface in CityEngine, is now out of beta and available in final version. See VCGA Editor for more information.
Python
- Added Python support for guides, enabling users to interact with them programmatically, see Guides: Enhanced functionality above.
- Fixed a bug in which the Python Console window output stopped functioning after reopening the console.
Tutorials and examples
We streamlined the documentation with new workflows and images in the following tutorials:
- Tutorial 11: Reporting—Learn how to use reports in CGA to calculate metrics, such as GFA and FAR for multiple buildings at once.
- Tutorial 12: Scripted report export—Learn how to export reports to a text file and how to use the script-based exporter.
- Tutorial 15: Publish web scenes—Learn about the CityEngine one-click exporter to make scenes accessible using Scene Viewer.
Further improvements and bug fixes:
- Tutorial 12: Scripted report export—Improved the method to calculate the asset centroid in the instanceReporting_dist.cga file.
- Tutorial 15: Publish web scenes—Updated the Esri Campus BuildingUse.cga file to work with the new convexify CGA command.
- Tutorial 19: VFX workflows—Fixed errors in the buildings.cga file.
- CityEngine Tour—Fixed errors in the Problems window.
- Example Pompeii—Improved generating walls.
- Example Redlands Redevelopment—Updated to work with the new convexify CGA command.
- Example Planning_05 Urban Design—Updated to work with the new convexify CGA command.
Updated 3rd party libraries
- Updated the built-in library of coordinate systems and improved the accuracy.
- Upgraded the UI Framework to Eclipse RCP 4.29 that fixes various small bugs.
- Applied security updates for zlib (1.3.0), libtiff (4.6.0), libxml (2.12.3), boost (1.84).
- Updated the Open Design Alliance library for IFC and DWG import/export to version 24.11.
- Updated the FBX support library to version 2020.3.4.
- Updated the glTF support libraries to fx-gltf 2.0.0 and nlohmann::json 3.11.3.