Be sure to read the CityEngine 2025.0 release notes for all the details on new features, enhancements, and bug fixes. Visit My Esri to upgrade to CityEngine 2025.0.
Are you new to CityEngine? Try it out with a fully-functional free-trial version.
Also, check out the CityEngine 2025.0 video highlights.
Starting a new era in street design
The new Street Designer in CityEngine 2025.0 empowers city planners and urban designers to create multimodal streetscapes in full 3D. This helps cities effectively achieve policy goals such as Complete Streets, green spaces, road diets, and placemaking. Its compelling 3D visuals enhance public outreach by clearly illustrating project impacts, and helping decision-makers and communities better understand and support street improvement initiatives.
Street Designer lets you define street configurations from pedestrian walkways to multi-lane boulevards. It gives you fine-grained control over elements such as road markings, street furniture, parking bays, and vegetation, as all the models are generated procedurally. You can now create streets with multiple lanes directly in the Viewport window using a new set of tools to add, delete, and move single lanes on a street segment.
Assign procedural rules to individual lanes to visualize them in high detail. To get you started, we added a set of new lane rules to the ESRI.lib for lane types such as public transport, bicycle, or car use. Just drag and drop the rules onto lanes in the Viewport window to bring your vision to life.
Store a set of lanes as street configurations that you can reapply across your city model to streamline the design iteration process. CityEngine includes multiple predefined configurations and are ready for you to use in your urban design or as a starting point to create your own configurations.
For more information, check out the An Introduction to Street Designer article and the Street Designer help.
CGA: Refined support for sequential programming
We enabled new programming paradigms, such as sequential programming, with the CGA features introduced in CityEngine 2024.1. In a sequential (rather than hierarchical) approach, geometry is tagged and collected step-by-step. In each step, the previous geometry can be extracted selectively and used to generate the next result, for example with 3D Boolean operations.
Such workflows are easier and more intuitive in CityEngine 2025.0 because of the following enhancements:
Refined syntax for 3D Booleans: Both operand Rules can now be directly written into the {} block and are applied on the same current shape.
Simpler syntax for the inline keyword: inline can now be used without parameter – append is the default now.
Supercharged comp split: The new noAlign mode keeps the input scope orientation, and the new =: operator groups selected components by mesh connectivity.
You can find the Sequential_Programming_Example, which was used to create the above pictures, in the VCGA Playground Example – just download it from within CityEngine 2025.0.
Visual CGA: Little helpers for productivity
The Visual CGA Editor received a series of improvements and features which boost productivity when working with VCGA designs. The new Find Node functionality in the toolbar lets you find that node you are looking for by typing in parts of the name. Direct support for @Material and @Color annotations in the node mini-inspector help reduce the number of nodes and connections in VCGA designs. The node layout has been optimized to better show long attr and extension point names, and the visualization of connections has been improved. Extension points which default to NIL are now visualized by an empty square and navigation has become more straight-forward by supporting 2D panning with the right mouse button.
Components can be VCGA designs themselves. It is now possible to change the InitialShapes node name and set the default behavior of an extension to NIL.
Better rendering in the Viewport
You may remember our blog post about optimizing your GPU’s rendering settings for better rendering in CityEngine. We took this one step further and now enable Antialiasing and Anisotropic filtering by default, resulting in smoother line rendering and sharper textures overall.
Tutorials and documentation
In conjunction with the Street Designer, we reorganized and updated multiple sections in the documentation, such as Create shapes, Create streets, and Transform objects, by adding overview tables and splitting long pages into individual topics for better discoverability. Also, we added the Learn the basics section under Get Started, helping everyone new to CityEngine to get a quick overview.
And finally, we continue to improve the CityEngine tutorial catalog by refurbishing the following tutorials:
- Tutorial 13a: Facade Wizard — Basic facade creation
Learn how to create horizontal and vertical splits to define ground and upper floor areas in a facade.
- Tutorial 13b: Facade Wizard — Advanced facade creation
Learn how to use images to create a facade rule template and create a mass model using the facade rule.
- Tutorial 14a: 2D and 3D shape modeling
Learn various manual shape drawing and editing techniques available for both 2D and 3D.
- Tutorial 18: Handles
Learn how to work with handles to edit CGA attributes within the Viewport window.
- Tutorial 20: Local edits
Learn how to use local edits to modify individual windows, floors, and balconies.