ArcGIS Urban integration
- The ArcGIS Urban integration in CityEngine now supports ground spaces in addition to surface and building spaces. On import, ground spaces are added to the same layer as surface spaces.
- A bug was fixed in which importing custom terrains would fail by updating the bounding box calculation for height maps. This fix avoids the Scene extent is too large error message and ensures that the terrain renders properly in the Viewport window.
- A bug was fixed in which importing custom elevation from ArcGIS Urban on ArcGIS Enterprise failed. You can now also import elevation services without tile map capability.
- A bug was fixed in which the ArcGIS Urban on ArcGIS Enterprise default elevation service would fail to import. It can now be downloaded from ArcGIS Online.
- A bug was fixed that caused the imported basemap texture resolution to surpass the recommended threshold for ArcGIS Urban imports (4096).
- A bug was fixed in which the generated result of ArcGIS Urban imported spaces would extrude when the SpaceType attribute was set as Surface. Shapes are no longer extruded with this attribute upon import to accurately represent 2D ground spaces that only have color applied.
- A bug was fixed in which imported ArcGIS Urban spaces were aligned relative to the terrain depending on floor number. This resulted in misaligned building spaces when published in a scene layer. Spaces are now vertically positioned according to their z-values.
- The dialog boxes for the ArcGIS Urban integration now support dark mode.
Material Browser
- When the Material Browser is open, you can no longer interact with any other part of the UI.
- The Material Browser now supports undoing any material assignment.
- Material previews now show a tooltip with the full name when hovering anywhere on the tile.
- The Material Browser now magnifies the UV coordinates for previews to improve the visibility of texture details.
- Support was added for light and dark UI modes.
- The Material Browser now automatically goes to the currently selected material upon opening.
- Performance was improved when changing materials on a large number of shapes.
- A bug was fixed in which the Material Browser showed empty material previews for custom materials added to ESRI.lib.
- Material previews are now properly anti-aliased on Intel GPUs and for desktop scaling values greater than 100 percent.
Inspector
- The Reset attributes option now also resets attributes that have been annotated as @Hidden after the initial value change.
- A bug was fixed in which the file path, folder path, or material attribute path were not correctly set relative to the project of the current rule file.
Tools
New functionality: Copy on Move
- You can now duplicate objects while moving them by turning on the Copy on Move toggle button in the Transform Move tool or by using the Ctrl shortcut. This also works when translating the object using numerical input.
Guides
- Snapping to the intersections of guides has been improved, specifically if the intersection point is the center point of a guide.
- The Guide Inspector now features a Locations section in the Inspector window, displaying the vertices of the guides.
Selection tool
- Hover highlights are now consistently rendered on top of selection highlights, making hovered edges more clearly distinguishable for precise interaction.
- The selection highlight colors of existing scenes were updated to the more modern color selection.
- Outline artifacts have been fixed when the Force Backface culling setting is on.
- An issue was resolved in which the hover highlight color was incorrect in wireframe mode when a layer had a custom color.
- The outline for static shapes has been removed to improve vertex visualization.
- A shine-through effect was added to make occluded static shapes visible.
- The computation of snapping points for edges and lines was improved, making them more accurate.
- A bug was fixed in which you couldn't select viewsheds, view domes, view corridors, or guides when they were moved far away from other scene objects. In rare cases, this also happened when moving them within the scene bounds.
Viewport: Two-point perspective
- The Two-point perspective correction setting for the camera was added, which makes the vertical edges appear parallel at shallow camera tilt angles.
This setting is particularly useful for maintaining accurate architectural representation, reducing distortion, and creating more realistic and visually appealing cityscapes.
This setting is enabled by default in new scenes. To enable the Two-point perspective correction setting on the Viewport toolbar for older scenes, click View Settings and select Two-point perspective correction.
Rendering
- Handling of textures that are used multiple times in CGA models has been optimized, which lowers memory usage and improves performance.
WebGIS: Licensing from ArcGIS Enterprise
- CityEngine can now be licensed from ArcGIS Enterprise 11.4 or later.
- A bug was fixed in which tile packages containing elevation exported from CityEngine could not be published on ArcGIS Enterprise portals.
- A bug was fixed n which after two consecutive runs of the Get Map Data tool, the two resulting terrains could not be individually turned on and off.
- The Get Map Data tool now resets the selected extent when you search for a location o avoid overlaying the entire view in dark gray.
Web scene export
- Support was added for sharing a web scene using Python.
- A bug was fixed n which layer hierarchies with nested group layers were not correctly merged in the shared web scene.
Import and Export
IFC
- Support was added for versions 4x1 and 4x2 to the importer.
IFC and DWG
- A bug was fixed in which using multiple IFC and DWG files in the same scene can lead to deadlocks.
FileGDB
- Merging of vertices for the FileGDB exporter has been disabled.
USD
- A bug was fixed in which the importer created multiple instances of the same material instead of one shared material.
- A bug was fixed in which the material attribute overrides in USD meshes were ignored by the importer.
glTF and OBJ
- You can now use base names for glTF and OBJ that contain any UTF8 characters. For OBJ exports, the .mtl material file name is still sanitized to only contain ASCII characters to maximize compatibility.
OBJ, GLTF, DAE, FBX, and VOB
- The export no longer adds _0 to the file name when the memory budget option is disabled.
Miscellaneous
- The Navigator window now allows searching for materials.
- The shortcut for cancelling model generation and Python scripts was changed to Ctrl+Alt+C.
- You now receive a notification when the currently open scene was modified by another user in CityEngine. This happens most often when projects are shared with multiple people.
- CE News now displays in the language that CityEngine uses, with English as the default.
- The Startup and Facade wizard window layouts have been removed.
- A bug was fixed in which the input fields in the Scene Light and Panorama settings remained locked after changing the Sun position source value.
- The header area of CityEngine dialog boxes have been simplified by removing background images.
- A bug was fixed in which the state of the check boxes in the tool dialog boxes was not clearly visible.
- The layout in the tool options is more user-friendly because the input fields now occupy 50 percent of the window width.
- The tab icon of the model hierarchy no longer changes during generation.
CGA Editor
- An error marker on the CGA Editor tab now allows you to quickly pinpoint rule files with errors.
CGA
- Inline rule invocation can be accomplished with the new inline keyword. A rule invocation with the inline keyword is immediately generated. The resulting geometry is combined into one shape and is available for successive modifications. This allows you to work on a combined shape that would otherwise be separated by procedural subdivision.
- Boolean 3D operations were added with the new union, subtract, and intersect keywords.
- In addition to using operations to set Auto-Tags, you can now manually set arbitrary tags on individual faces, edges, and vertices using the tag operation. Such tags allow you to assign a semantic meaning to parts of the geometry and can be accessed at a later point of the generation because all operations transfer tags to the next modified geometry.
- The insert operation has a new parameter you can use to disable cleanup and optimization. This means tiny details in the geometry of the inserted asset are kept untouched.
- The extrude operation now supports extruding edges to faces. Those edges usually come from an edge component split.
- The cleanupGeometry operation better preserves first edges in faces and edge tags.
- The copyUV operation and geometry.hasUVs function were added.
- The internal precision of the procedural model generation was improved by switching from single to double precision floating point numbers. This results in more accurate computations.
VCGA
- Overall responsiveness of the UI has been improved when dealing with many nodes.
- A material value node and a material attribute node were added that allow you to select materials using the Material Browser.
- The UI was translated.
- Nodes can now be cut (Ctrl+X). Copied nodes are pasted at the pointer position and have a _copy suffix in their name.
- When creating node connections, invalid cycles are now prevented and the highlighting of valid input slots was improved.
- Changing the component file is now done using the built-in node picker instead of a file explorer.
- The appearance of the annotation editor and the node context menu has been improved when the editor is small.
- Mouse interaction has been improved as follows:
- Now you can open the context menu with a single mouse click when nodes are selected.
- An incorrect pointer has been fixed in some situations.
- Incorrect behavior when dragging the pointer outside of the editor has been fixed.
- Inconsistent behavior of highlighting extension points in a node and in the Viewport window has been fixed.
- A bug was fixed in which disabling a component node did not activate the default implementation of a connected extension.
- A bug was fixed in which an extension node was not correctly updated when the respective extension point was removed.
- A bug was fixed in which invalid strings were deleted in the annotation editor instead of marking them as invalid.
- A bug was fixed in which extension points were incorrectly highlighted in the Viewport window after changing the component file of a node.
System
- A bug was fixed that was preventing the CGA and Python offline references from rendering correctly on Linux.
- A bug was fixed that was preventing CityEngine from starting on the first launch on Linux.
Tutorials
- Work with ArcGIS Urban integration—In this new Essentials tutorial, you'll learn how ArcGIS Urban and CityEngine provide a participatory planning and urban design solution for city planners, designers, GIS analysts, and 3D visual artists.