City Engine

As an introduction: CityEngine® is a standalone software and a conceptual design and modelling tool for professional users in entertainment, architecture, urban planning, GIS and general 3D content production. It is primarily aimed at time-efficient creation of 3D cities and buildings. The main concept of CityEngine is the "procedural" approach towards modeling. The computer is given a code-based "procedure" which represents a series of commands - in this context geometric modeling commands - which then will be executed. Instead of the "classical" intervention of the user, who manually interacts with the model and models 3d geometries, the task is described "abstractly", in a rule file.

Coming across Bekerman's experiments with City Engine on his VenICE project, I was wondering whether Procedural Inc.'s approach for further development of their flagship product goes to city modelling or city planning. The example mentioned above is a modelling practice, while recent cooperation among Procedural Inc. and ESRI is a true evidence of their interest in stepping more deeply into the planning realm.

That is in fact the choice that many other practitioners such as Agency 9 have also made in recent years. Agency 9 AB which is a privately owned Stockholm-based visualization firm was founded in 2003. The firm started as a game design group and then shifted to production of online 3d maps and visualization tools. Their planning application, City Planner is a user-friendly and web-based tool for creating, sharing and communicating of future urban plans. The inputs to the program are 3d models of planned urban entities constructed in SketchUp, Maya or 3D Studio Max. Proposals are located in their surroundings and are made available to all stakeholders. This software provides the infrastructure required for adding geo-referenced feedback to a developing urban plan.The most dominant characteristic of CityPlanner is user-friendliness, simplicity and ease of communication through web. The tool has its focus on providing 3D visualization for planning procedures and does not include so many analytic functions or data-processing capabilities.

Sources: 

City Engine Help manual

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJLvawS_5lA

Academia

In September, I had the opportunity to share outcomes of my recent studies with students of the master program "Sustainable Urban Planning and Design" in two occasions:

5th September, an overview of use of visualization in participatory planning was presented. This was in fact a revised version of my thesis work complemented by more background information, less focused on web-basedness and altered to better reflect the entire picture rather than my personal approach.

On the 14th of September, I gave a speech on 3d city models and 3d city modeling titled as: "An Overview of Three-Dimensional City Models; Historical Perspectives and a Contemporary Debate: Beauty vs. Brain". This was a summary on - among all - basic concepts in the field such as DEM(1), DSM(2); DTM(3), LOD(4), a history of creation of digital city models, different approaches, the vanishing borderline between digital maps and digital models and contemporary debates namely semantic city models and widespread use of CityGML.

In addition, an introductory lab session was held on use of the digital urban creation tool, City Engine, and implementation of procedural routines and grammar-based modeling. This was mainly focused on getting acquainted to the interface, experimenting basic functions of growing a street network from a scratch with help of shape files, creating urban lots, rendering those lots and streets into photo-realistic urban features based on the rules imposed by CGA files and customizing individual buildings by manipulating a set of parameters...

The above-mentioned were parts of the course AG2119 (Applied Analysis and International Planning Practice), year 2011, KTH.

1) Digital Elevation Model
2) Digital Surface Model
3) Digital Terrain Model
4) Level Of Detail