Desert City Tutorial PDF
Desert City Tutorial PDF
Esri CityEngine
DESERT CITY TUTORIAL
Tutorial Steps Recreating the full scene Focus Intervention: New School
2 3 6
Prerequisites
Installed CityEngine (Version 2012 Advanced or later) Pay attention to user interface information (especially how to navigate) when installing Download the Desert City Example via Help > Download Tutorials and Examples, or via the CityEngine Resource Center (http://resources.arcgis.com/content/cityengine/about).
Tutorial Steps
Exploring the Desert City scene file
Double click the Desert City scene file, which is located in the scene folder. Hit Generate in the first dialog which opens. This triggers the Model generation of all elements.
Navigate through the scene and explore the buildings, streets and vegetation. Youll notice that only a fraction of all buildings are generated by default. This is obviously the case to save memory resources. Edit some rule parameters, such as Building_Height, Building_Usage, or the Level of Detail. Select some more building footprints or street shapes (left mouse botton click or draw a selection rectangle. Note the different behavior if you select left-right or right-left with a selection rectangle!) Hit the Generate button in the toolbar or press ctrl-g (apple-g on MacOS) to trigger the Model Generation of the newly selected shapes.
In the Navigator Window, locate the data folder. From within the data folder, drag-and-drop the DesertCityGDB.gdb directly into the 3d viewport. This triggers the GDB Import Dialog.
Uncheck the TerrainExtent Layer Click Next and in the following settings, just activate the Merge Nodes Option with a Merging Distance of 2, then hit Finish.
o o o o o o
> Desert_City_Streets.cga > Desert_City_Powerlines.cga > Desert_City_Walls.cga > Desert_City_Buildings.cga > Desert_City_Structures.cga > Desert_City_Vegetation.cga
First, hide all Layers except the Street Layer. Select some Blocks with a right-left rectangle selection. In the Inspector, go to the Blocks tab and change the shapeCreation parameter to true, then set the lotAreaMin and Max to 2000 and 4000. In each Block, select one shape, then select all shapes in the same group (right click context menu). Once you have the selection, assign the Rule called Desert_City_ParcelTexturing.cga. Generate.
Our GIS application to edit the data is ArcMap, so lets open the dataset in ArcMap. Create a blank map in ArcMap and import the feature classes from the example dataset as layers (DesertCityGDB.gdb). For the actual intervention, create a new GDB, name it e.g. MyIntervention.gdb. It is best that you directly locate the GDB in your projects data folder on your harddrive. Create the following Feature Classes: o Polygon Features: named Intervention_Buildings Add the following attributes: Building_Height (of type float) Building_Usage (of type text) o Polygon Features: named Intervention_Soccer_Field [ Add no attributes ] o Point Features: named Intervention_Vegetation Add the following attributes: Size (of type float) o Line Features: named Intervention_Walls Add the following attributes: width (must be lower case!) (of type float)
Create the different features: Draw one or multiple school buildings, with realistic heights [meters] and set the Building_Usage attribute to school. Create some walls as polylines, set the width to 0.4 meters. The width value will be mapped directly in CityEngine. Create a rectangular Soccer Field. Distribute some Vegetation Points and set their Size attributes to realistic values between 2 and 15 meters. Save the GDB. Unless you created the GDB in the projects data folder, move or copy it there. Refresh the workspace in CityEngine: File > Refresh Workspace.
Align the Shapes and Graphs to the Terrain. Assign the rules. Theres also a rule for the Soccer field. In case the Soccer field is created in the wrong direction, set the attribute Orientation_Change to true.