CityEngine is a stand-alone desktop software application for the design, planning, and modeling of urban environments in 3D. The current release connects to the rest of the ArcGIS system primarily through data exchange, though this will become more tightly integrated in future releases.

CityEngine allows professional users in GIS, CAD, and 3D to:

• Quickly generate 3D cities from existing 2D GIS data.
• Do conceptual design in 3D, based on GIS data and procedural rules.
• Efficiently model virtual 3D urban environments for simulation and entertainment.

CityEngine also provides advanced capabilities for the direct export of the generated 3D city models out to other software tools, such as data management/analysis packages (like ArcGIS), 3D editing software (like Maya or 3ds Max), geo-visualization tools (like ArcGlobe or Google Earth), game engines (like Unity or Unreal), high-end rendering solutions (like RenderMan), or web-ready cloud rendering services (like RealityServer).

CityEngine comes with very powerful new functionality:

• Full File Geodatabase support including import and export of textured multipatches
• Intuitive editing of 3D multipatch models—new, easy-to-use editing tools for the quick sketching and texturing of 3D models (e.g., multipatch).
• Share 3D CityEngine Web Scenes on ArcGIS Online—Publish 3D city scenes directly to the web for sharing 3D models, analysis results, or design proposals with decision makers or the public. Based on WebGL technology, no plugin is required for most browsers.
• Visualize urban planning zoning rules in 3D—Zoning regulations are text-based descriptions (per city) of allowed building volumes, usage and density. They are the main tool defining the layout of a city and set the guidelines for growth and development. In most cases, however, they are hard to understand by the public and other stakeholders. CityEngine allows you to specify, visualize, analyze and store/maintain zoning regulations in 3D.
• Perspective Facade Image Cropping—Intuitive and effective tool for the preparation of facade textures from ground based facade images; perspective correction and region selection are done in one step.
• Improved Street Sketching and Network Analysis—Sketching of streets has been significantly improved with the new editing tools. After street network creation, the network can be analyzed by computing global integration, local integration and in-between centrality. For each street these three values are computed and stored as object attributes.
• New examples and rules at the CityEngine Community:
  • Visualizing zoning regulations in 3D
  • Sample (panelizing) 3D buildings that can be imported into ArcGIS to perform analysis such as inter-building visibility and solar exposure
  • Desert City example which shows a procedural Middle Eastern City based on real GIS data
• Esri licensing

CityEngine is used by professionals in the following industries:

• Urban planning, design and development (architectural visualization and local government)
• Entertainment (films, commercials, games)
• Real world simulation, emergency response and defense
• Academia

Procedural modeling means that 3D geometries and textures are constructed using rules (procedures) instead of labor-intensive manual modeling.

A single procedural rule can be used to generate many 3D models. For example, the rule can make use of feature attribute information stored in GIS data—such as the number of floors, roof type, wall material type, etc.—to generate a series of alternate 3D models that accurately represent the properties of each feature. The more attributes you have, the more accurate the generated model can be.

CityEngine comes with a number of example projects that contains rules that you can modify to see how the rules drive the 3D content. We also made generic rule sets available at our CityEngine Community and encourage the user community to share their rules as well.