CityEngine and Urban Planning CEUM 2019

hello everyone thank you very much for the opportunity to present here at the City Engine user meeting in Zurich in 2019 very disappointed I couldn't be there in person it's just some unfortunate circumstances but thrilled the opportunity and the invite extended to me from from Matt Bruno and Gabrielle and everyone over there urban and thankful for the opportunity to still provide this this presentation hopefully it's not too awkward sort of watching a pre-recorded video but I really do appreciate the opportunity and I hope to see everyone next year I was really looking forward to to meeting a lot of you I know I follow a great number of you on Twitter I follow your work it's inspiring it's not that often I can have a conversation with someone about CGA so I was really looking forward to the opportunity to to be there in person but perhaps 2020 or maybe even in the the fall I'm trying to see if I can arrange a trip out there to Zurich so yeah special thanks to to Matt Bruno Gabrielle and everyone over over there would also like to thank dominic and Pascal and the the tyre City Engine team for this awesome software that really made all this possible so a little bit about me I am a principal and a co-founder of housey Levine associates we're based in Chicago we do work all over the country my specialty is 3d and development visualization and GIS I've presented a number of different conferences about planning graphics and maps and and was an early user of Sketchup I know one of the things that we see now with the 3d web scenes is sketchy styles I was one of the creators of the very first sketchy Styles and Sketchup still to this day it ships with with a style I created so yeah I think I have a pretty good understanding about the importance of role of graphics at least in the field of city planning and in urban design which is where my specialty is my firm I started at 15 years ago with my business partner John house he'll was just the two of us we've grown it to a practice of about 25 planners we love what we do we strive for innovation and creativity we do work all over the United States I think we're active right now projects in about 22 different states and we do studies big and small from big regional master plans to real small specific sites and constantly we're just trying to sort of innovate and be fun and something were real proud of in 2014 we received a National Planning Excellence Award from the American Planning Association and in giving us this distinction they noted our use of technology and I've said this to some people how we were using technology in 2014 we are so far past that now and probably more deserving of this award now than then we were back then this is a graphic we put together for the ESRI user conference a couple years ago we wanted to highlight really everything that's in our do design toolbox so these are all the Colin I guess our core tools that were in and out of on a daily basis as we we run through all the different planning that we do so there's a lot of ESRI software here there's a lot of Adobe software in here we're still doing things like sketching by hand Unreal Engine has been a you know an exciting addition to what we do there's some software we created here about social but I want to talk to you here today about the city engine and in our work with city engine how how we use it and I can say you know we get real excited about GIS and city engine you know I can remember driving and slamming my brakes just to capture this picture or pulling on my phone when I saw this guy driving by just sort of you know the kind of the nerdy stuff that that we get excited about as we as we run through our our day so we're working right now if the city of or the town of Greenwich Connecticut it's just outside of Manhattan it's a suburb for Manhattan to the fluence suburb and give you just a quick peek and how we use City Engine on this project not a real big city into project we'd you know some simple CTA code we took their building footprints and extruded a 3d map and highlighted in the middle is a corridor it's called the post Road or Putnam Avenue and we highlighted the existing buildings and we have these zoning workshops and the residents of the community were telling us that you know they didn't really like the new development that was coming out of the ground so one of the things we thought was important to show them was here's their existing buildings using City Engine applying their zoning rules to the parcels we showed them these are the buildings that you could get as of right with your zoning ordinance and then when we showed that next to the buildings that exist they could see the disparity between you know what they're what they're allowing it what they want Cape Cod Massachusetts we were brought on board really to help them with their graphics with their Maps with their 3d work they have a very rich data set they have a 3d model of the entire Cape so we plug right into their servers all the maps we created we're pulling live from their database but this one here this example we did the Cape Cod transect so similar to Andres Duany 'he's smart code where you have the transect they identified eight different districts within the Cape so what we did is we combed through their GIS and we sort of found where we thought these eight different place types lived they have real rich data they have paint as parking lots as a line file so all the stripes in their parking it's driveways building footprints we took all of that data we brought it into the city engine and we wrote these real small rules for it a rule for paint a rule for pavement a rule for grass and we turned back and we gave them these 3d models at the different places so this is how it lives in the plan you can see the natural air is nothing too exciting there the rural development areas and then there suburban development again that paint actually drawn out from offsetting the center line I think I brought it in as a graph network and wrote a real simple rule to outline it based on you know six or eight inches and this is something a little more recent working with the town outside of Indianapolis called Brownsburg Indiana five years ago they hired us to do a comprehensive plan for them and this new expressway was was under construction this is where it was and so we did this visualization for them and we showed them what the expressway could look like as it runs through town and they loved this drawing and I can tell you looks good I have no idea how many units were in here what we what we did is we took the existing aerial and we went around and we pieced together little snippets from all over the country where we thought we know we knew they wanted a lifestyle center or mall we knew they want a multi-family housing that look like this and so in Photoshop we stitched together and scaled into perspective all these different drawings some are one-offs you know these little one office buildings we place them in stretch them in and then we to sort of hide the I guess the blemishes in the joints we ran it through a sketch filter and we sort of gave them this and so this is what is in that plan and it's been guiding them for for the last five years they've got a lot of developer interest they've recently rehired us to update the plan and one of the things they asked for was can you give us some better visualizations for this we've seen some of the work your firm's been doing is progressed a lot in the last five years we want to sort of see some city engine work so taking that that corridor we brought it into city engine identified you know real simply the different types of land-uses we built out these dashboards so we know how many acres were talking about how many square feet we're using their zoning rules so 100-foot setbacks for light industrial properties rear yards where the parking lots are getting located and still in progress we're about eighty eighty-five percent of the way there and I can tell you they they absolutely love it and this is sort of sort of what it looks like now it's a little further along we got the interstate in some traffic we've swapped out those Lego trees for some real vegetation in the parking lots the next step is we'll start building some facades on those buildings but kind of a pretty good leap from where we were five years ago to where we are now all made possible of course by by city engine so some of the questions I get asked is sort of what is our workflow look like and the answer we sort of give back is it varies it depends on what we're trying to do so we have really three workflows a city engine scene workflow where we're going to be pulling in 3d assets that we build either and Sketchup or blender or some other 3d products will develop those assets will will export them here in step 2 as Coolatta files or OBJ's and now we got a pretty extensive library we also use turbosquid and form funds there's a couple of really good resources for some some good 3d content we'll start to create a concept in City Engine simply adding the centerline's subdivision parameters the Lots then we just write the CGA we call in those 3d assets and then we apply the rules to generate the scene and probably the best example of this workflow we were hired to do a master plan for Bentonville Arkansas boy probably pretty close to the geographic center of the United States it's the home of Walmart corporation so a beautiful downtown Walmart has been criticized here for sort of killing the mom and pops downtown Bentonville I don't know if I've seen a nicer sort of town center pedestrian area here in the United States but outside of the downtown and their growth areas that was really struggling with suburban development they're getting these developers that weren't communicating with each other they were just sort of building out parcels as one property only one of the cells so there wasn't a lot of coordination here and so we wanted to create this graphic that showed how they could implement some best practices for their suburban development so on top of a Google era aerial we just sketched out this plan this is sort of what we're thinking of so one of our planners in how sketch this out I'll say this in this example geo referencing this JPEG was probably the hardest thing of this whole project once we had established sort of our geographic location and our map projection at City Engine getting this in here at the exact location was was pretty tough I'm not going to like what we ended up doing was geo referencing it inside of inside of ArcGIS exporting it then as a tiff with a world file and then bringing it the city in soon to make it sit in the right spot so we brought it and I'll just sort of walk you through fade it out and then in City Engine we trace over top with the graph network or the street network that drawing and from there it's real simple I think we just used the modern streets role for this one drop them in you can see we're adding the trees in the parkway sidewalks crosswalks from there we created those blocks we applied the city's subdivision parameters for minimum lot sizes and lot widths and and then their zoning parameters and then we called in our 3d models all those Sketchup houses that we had start to finish took only about two hours and let's say an hour of that was spent just fidgeting with that with that graphic so this is what it looks like inside that plan we sort of call attention to the subdivisions design characteristics and some best practices with those numbers brought it into Photoshop to sort of punch up the colors but I think a pretty cool graphic for this plan something that boy I don't even know how long this would have taken me using just Sketchup alone probably at least or at least a week never mind being able to move through this with all those trees and vegetation and Sketchup just impossible but using City engine to kind of stitch all this together was key another workflow we have is where we're using City Engine as our asset workflow so here we never really intend to develop our final scene in city engine we're just can use City Engine to give us a detailed 3d model that we're gonna kick back into - Sketchup or another 3d program like like Eon or or now unreal and so we create a site plan in Sketchup we identify the buildings the locations the trees and then what we do is we export the building footprints as Colada files or I've now found my favorite way to do it is KML files we bring those into into city engine where we apply the city engine rules to give us a more detailed model we bring that back - Sketch up and then from there we render it and do the finishing touches so this drawing here poster exhibit we gave to a city how to reutilize a an old area all the little storefronts and buildings generated inside of city engine so that workflow really starts with taking a look at a site this is a different site a little further up the road but the exact same process we take the building we start to sort of look at that general program sketching out some ideas and concepts from there we refine them just kind of giving the client some some idea of what we're talking about not detailing out the parking areas per se just kind of showing where the parking areas are going to be what existing building is going to stay what that circulation pattern looks like and from there which we try to work with them to pick an option we bring that in as a JPEG into into Sketchup and real almost out of the box we're trying to find the view and this is sort of something that so advice I know I give when I when I'm teaching people how to use Sketchup is if all you're producing is a static render and there's never going to be any one sort of walking around don't spend a lot of detail on the on the back sides almost treated like a Hollywood movie set now I'll say with the immersive 3d and giving someone the ability to to browse and explore on the web not a good idea but if if you know you're just looking for a static image so if I figure out what that view is is important it lets you know - how much detail you're going to need so we find that view we quickly just sort of mask these out give us an idea of what what this site looks like and then we brought those building footprints into city engine and so this is this rule we have we call it our DB G or a detailed building generator I'm looking at the year this it's March of 2015 so four years old we're on our second or third generation of this but we pull in those footprints and we can really start to add things like building articulation banding balconies window patterns a real detailed 3d model we've made a lot of changes to the that rooftop and I know question someone asked me why do we put rooftop mechanicals on some of our models and what we have found is the key to drawing is being able to see and as we sort of look at aerial photographs we start to you really start to analyze which your eye is seeing and it'll help you draw just have a little more realism when you don't add little details like that all the 3d buildings you're drawing or just white and flat on top and they start to contrast with with some of the existing buildings so yes so we use this this role or rules like it sometimes it's just for parking lots and we're just kind of quickly jumping into into city inch and give us some detailed 3d work that we could bring back into a 3d program so ultimately it was a building something like this this was an early export brought it into into City Engine or sorry into Sketchup we render this right in Sketchup with a program called shader light makes it it makes it just a little more attractive than just a straight Sketchup export some ray tracing that happens takes a while but ultimately we produced this rendering for them and the city loved it and they asked us to explore another option they thought this was too dense the building was too close to the corner and they also felt that putting detention beneath the ground was going to be too expensive so they asked us for another option and let's say fortunately with the money we had saved by not having to do all that detail 3d in the building we had enough budget left over to give him another option so that is the exact same process we did for this and I'll say one of the things we're excited about now is taking you know this workflow and and bringing it into like programs like unreal with the data Smith plug-in to give us the ability just to kind of drop right into our our scenes and to be able to sort of run around we have a city outside of outside of Raleigh that's asked us to give them an immersive town center development in Unreal Engine and so the entire project I'll be working on this summer is something a lot like this it'll be built in City Engine and then brought into Unreal 4 for an immersive walkthrough they're gonna put a kiosk in the city hall either you have people navigate through W a s and D or a xbox joystick or something but give people the ability to sort of walk around this new town center area that we're planning out for them so something we're extremely excited about a little bit more of that later and then the next I guess the final workflow I'll highlight is just a hybrid workflow it's really how all that software in that wheel of course what it comes together to give us the the products we're looking for so it all sort of has the same workflow step one we're creating that program we're using pen and paper we're identifying what needs to be developed in step two we're collecting GIS data what do we need for the scene we're looking for parcel information and center lines and then inside of ArcGIS we're going to edit that information to the extent possible knowing that in city engine will be writing rules that connect all those attributes where there's holes or where there's maybe some key sites that need a little more control over the design we'll use CAD or Sketchup to do a little more detailed site planning we're just applying those CGA rules in city engine to the center lines the parcels and those custom shapes we created in step three and then the last one is sort of you know the finishing touches if we need to bring it into Unreal Photoshop Sketchup Aeon Aeon view whatever however we're gonna render it out we'll we'll figure it out we know that you know City engine produces some nice visuals but you know to really get it the best it really needs to get to get rendered out us out of something I've I've accomplished a little bit of a hack with some grass and I'll show you what that is in just a bit so this past year at the ESRI user conference we had a map gallery we showcased eight of our maps at the map gallery so here they all are sort of in a row 1 1 through 8 and that we created a little tiny version of our of our exhibit and there I am serving walking this gentleman through the evolution of professional hockey a map but two of the projects on here I want to highlight and this is the you know the title of my presentation reimagining a city with GIS this took second place in the 3d map category that we have an economic win for geo design this took first place in the 3d map category we also want an award for this Flint I think in total they give out 12 or 15 awards and we are pleased to have won three of them for our work ok so this first one an economic Winfred GeoDesign I think Christian last year presented on this for me little it's where we took a golf course and turned it into a corporate campus and so the city was facing this loss of a major employer but part of what we were hired to do we did this downtown master plan for the city and it included let me go back here sorry the typical planing graphics you'd see but what I want to highlight is this opportunity sites where we highlighted three different types of opportunity sites green being sites that would add value meaning shouldn't be a priority but if they redeveloped it would probably be a positive contribution to downtown these yellow ones were redevelopment priority larger sites visible sites under single ownership and then these red ones were these catalyst sites these sites that the city should put a focus on developing you can see how big they are these are the types of sites where if they develop they're going to start generating development around it and so we used Sketchup in city engine to create these little simple vignettes for those yellow sites and just wanted to convey some simple illustrations but this implementation top five was bringing a major employer to downtown and so they asked us to take a look at their waterfront and and visualize it for them and so sketching out the potential of what the waterfront was we had to include a a basketball arena we knew there was a minor league basketball team that was looking for a city they told us they wanted some Class A office space some high-end office space right on the water so we sketched out this this concept and then and then using that I guess that hybrid approach using Sketchup for the the site plan and then city engine for all these rules we popped this up into 3d we gave them a web scene they went out and they marketed it marketed it and before this plan was developed they had managed to get a commitment from the basketball team the city started building the arena the Wisconsin herd is now playing minor league basketball in in Oshkosh what we later learned though was that a Class A office space was for a company called Oshkosh corporation fortune 500 company that was getting some pressure to consolidate all these regional offices and bring them in under one one campus and so they told the city they needed a WoW campus 40 plus acres they want to be off the interstate they wanted to be in a park-like setting and so the city exhausted all options to to keep them and ultimately didn't think they could and it was when we basically said hey the golf course fits all of that criteria so they asked us to to come to town to hold a conversation with their residents and to help sell the concept of taking this city golf course and making it a campus for the Oshkosh corporation so we gave us only about two weeks to start to help them visualize so we you know took two hours little sketch plans tried to think of what it could look like we gave them a couple different options for for the area one maximizing open space the other one maximizing what we felt would be the market opportunities for additional development ultimately they chose the one that that maximize the open space so we did this and in Sketchup and then really a lot of the site site work here was done and Sketchup although some of the the street work and in the buildings up in through here popped it into city engine rented out we gave them a again another web scene where they could give it to the Oshkosh corporation to tour the site to look at it to see exactly what it was we were we were proposing we we gave this to the the residents that we showed them you know this is what we're talking about we're not losing all the open space they're taking 40 acres is going to be plenty of open space for all these other uses and at the end of the day we got buy-in from from everyone I still remember the very first resident standing up saying you know we can find a new place to golf but if we lose this employer the city's in trouble so the city submitted this bid application to Oshkosh corporation to say hey we'd love for you to stay in town we'd love for you to take the city golf course and turn it into your campus and so this was the poster we put together and the visuals ultimately we were pleased in November of last year November 2017 sorry they announced that they were accepting the bid they purchased the property from the city and the building is under construction they broke ground you can see they'll be open later this year the city has been frequently sending along some images for us to help us track the progress so quite a success story something we're proud of it earned us some the SAG Award a special achievement in GIS award last year for for the work the sort of last one this is a this at a bigger scale reimagining a city with using GIS and city engine so this isn't Battle Creek Michigan this took second place and in the poster where the city asked us to reinvention the downtown core and their approach characters so the final poster that we assembled sort of tells the whole story and I'll do a deeper dive in it right now so this was the the final exhibit so the story goes back to earlier that year we were working with the city of Battle Creek on their master plan so the city's long range 20 year blueprint how everything should should grow and build out all of our planning studies we did a ton of research things like market research data demographics looking to make sure that when we develop these plan there's some science behind it they're not just colors on a map we know for designating an area for a commercial that we've done the market assessment to know there's enough commercial potential in the market ultimately I think it's pretty disingenuous as a planner to just color a street red because it's a busy road and you want to be commercial so the the entire GIS stack and this is where we say what geo design is to us allows us to put a lot more spatial intelligence into the plans were developing so we developed this land-use plan we looked at things like green infrastructure and in catalyst redevelopment sites and and the cities asked us they said this area along Columbia Avenue we have the lake in town we don't feel it's very well utilized there's no beach there's no place to get at it everything sort of turns its back to it and then the corridor itself it's real Auto centric not a lot of pedestrian orientation it needs sort of a shot in the arm and so using City engine we developed this concept it's a this documents 11 by 17 so this is a forty or sorry 34 inch spread so big wide spread showing Columbia Avenue and we're highlighting here you know larger redevelopment at some of these key intersections what it would look like how it would be treated you can see the buildings closer up in the street but not in all instances but what we're saying is you know sometimes you might need to go into the residential areas really all of the the best practice recommendations so this was done entirely in City in June we got a rule that just scatters boats in the water we use that in Oshkosh too then on the other side of the spread we start to get in where we're activating the beach so the parking lot mixed-use buildings and this same filter that we used in that Brownsburg we used here I'm not sure why I don't think they like the the feel of the 3d work didn't feel like it matched the rest of the document so the acid we can make it look more cartoony so the solution was just to bring it into Photoshop with with a treatment what's exciting though is the Kellogg Foundation so Kellogg cereal and corn flakes they're based in Battle Creek Michigan the foundation that helps the city with its with its economic saw this plan and said boy that's great would it be possible to see what the entire city would look like if it were redeveloped so a pretty big task for us something no way would have ever been possible with without city engine trying to think how many different parcels there are thousands and to come up with every development scenario for every single one I mean probably could have retired on it if they would have had us detailed it out but they gave us a decent sized budget and they asked us to help them visualize what it could be and so we took the land-use classifications you can see here a traditional neighborhood suburban residential we took all these designations and inside of City Engine we developed the land use technologies are the rules that would generate these different areas so a traditional neighborhood a multi-unit residential neighborhood or multi-unit structures neighborhood commercial community open space corridor commercial downtown mixed use and then production center employment and some of them are even even these special areas and then we also identified I think 13 different Road Sion's 12 I'm sorry 12 different classifications of roads so the four-lane divided highway 5 Lane 5 Lane arterial with a center turn lane we built out all of these streets in City Engine so we had these land-use type ologies and this was an early test so we went to see if our rules were working we sort of extruded out the study area and these approach corridors we started to apply the rules to see if we were getting really what we were hoping for and here which is sort of color coding them ultimately this is what was what was delivered to the city this is a shot out of the browser so there's a 3d web scene and I'll share the link with you at the at the end of the project or at the end of the presentation but the entire thing is is inside of a a 3d web scene inside of ArcGIS online so the white buildings the buildings that are remaining the buildings in color are the the new buildings that are getting created so I'll walk you through sort of how we got from parcel information to this I mentioned that GIS process here you can see inside of ArcGIS pro I've highlighted a centerline we added fields these are all going to be attributes we're gonna read inside of of city engine so the street width this is in meters sidewalk right sidewalk left number of lanes what that Center treatment was with the Parkway with was the sidewalk width and then what was to the left and right so inside of City Engine you can see here it is just sort of all brought in let's see four four thousand two hundred and sixty objects so it's a collection of different places without the line work off it looks identical to the to the scene so I'll walk you through some of the CGA and the approach to taking on some of these the first one was the residential neighborhoods we you could see how we took a parcel and then it's got all these splits in it well what we wanted to do was after we applied the zoning information so the setbacks we wanted to make sure that the leftover houses that were getting built weren't ginormous so if someone owned a really big residential lot and you just apply those setbacks we wanted to make sure that the resulting house wasn't too too big or or too small so within the CGA we just did this recursive check we kept splitting it by 50% and then we have a an attribute that's max building footprint size and we set that in some neighborhoods where we know that houses were a little larger to 2,000 square feet in the areas where we knew the neighborhood's were a little less affluent the Lots were smaller we set it down to about 1,500 square feet we also randomized the number of storeys between a one-story and a two-story and then randomized the roof colors I think there's seven different colors of roof seven different colors of siding else a building square buildings and then the roofs are very between the four so all the textures you're seeing we drew by hand I mentioned two before the city wanted like a cart a softer cartoony look so what we did is we hand drew an illustrator all the different textures and let me tap out here and I could show you so inside of Adobe Illustrator we drew in you know a rear elevation of a house so that's just the the patio door we're putting a little drop shadow on there to give some visual relief the siding is just just a texture or hand-drawn texture inside assume the brickwork in here we literally drew everything by hand and if I show you the outline view you can see all that geometry so we we drew all those textures and exported them into into the folder and then ultimately brought them into sketch or a city engine where we use City Engine to randomly apply them so whether if it was the front elevation of a house we put a front door whose the rear we put a patio door kind of a weird block it's a double frontage block there's really two fronts on both of those but you can see the front doors along that street so kind of a neat way and here's a better look at where you can see how we had to subdivide to get realistic housing sizes otherwise if we hadn't done that recursive split those initial shapes would have really been gigantic for the multifamily similar approach but one of the things that we we sort of noticed as we became familiar with the community is a lot of the multifamily in town is built up by the same developer has kind of that same appearance and so what we did is we developed a few styles and we kind of clustered them together and we matched style so buildings that are kind of near each other have the same style as you move through the entire model just I think about ten or twelve different types of multifamily styles but we're adding those balconies and in our textures you know some shadows that show some relief it's just a flat texture we're trying to keep the polygons at a minimum our commercial areas you know these areas along busy highways major major parking lots our rule we created it creates this parking lot you can kind of see the how the splits are handled we texture in the stalls and then we can add cars through just a slider how how occupied is that parking lot so a detail we left off going onto the web we wanted to make sure the web scene was was fast but a lot of the the visuals we gave them the static imagery we took these Lego trees we turn them into realistic trees we added cars we added people yeah so here we can change the aisle with the occupancy right inside of of city engine in the last area that the downtown instead of parking in front we put the parking behind it if the building was over so many stories instead of doing a surface parking lot the CJ rule creates a parking deck so a parking structure let's see I can as well tap out I can show you what that looks like right inside of City Engine if it's open this right here okay so here's that building and you can see that the parking garage occupied there's the there's the ramp I can come into that rule how many levels is it a ten level parking garage that Ram structure gets built the whole way and the other thing I thought I did I thought we I was maybe that was an optimization I was going to do I was gonna restrict on the other floors restrictive parking to just the stalls by the windows unison I think it's kind of helps sell it when you see those those cars but I don't think there's a need to for a car like that to be in there you're never gonna see it but yeah so let me see here if I can show you you know the entire scene this was a special area where we we use those detailed buildings so these buildings are a little more detailed were they were sort of the these catalyst buildings but this parking garage roll I was looking at it I was like well maybe I can share this I think it's pretty simple but I think I noticed I was doing some yeah some cosign some pretty complex math to kind of figure out how that ramp continued to kind of zigzag down down the down the parking structure so this is sort of a before after you could see there the the new vegetate or the vegetation for that key site and really what we did based on that they actually asked us to identify some other key sites give them a little more treatment so quickly sketch them out in CAD brought them into City Engine and gave them these renderings they're using this now to market these sites so where are we headed I mean we're headed into Unreal Engine and the gaming engines for sure the data Smith plugin has really made that possible what really got us amped up was a little side project we did an in source and so sources Counter Strike Team Fortress portal csgo it's it's another video gaming engine we play some video games at work and what we wanted to do was surprise our staff with a level of our of our office so using Sketchup city engine Photoshop ArcGIS Pro in the hammer editor last summer we we started looking around our office we said hey could we model this out and give our our staff sort of a playground so to speak to have some fun and my brother's the architect we had all the CAD plans so we brought these into into Sketchup but we we did all the interior work inside of Sketchup when we got outside in the streets is where we did some really cool work with with the city engine so we started to take photos of everything in the office the steps on your way up to our office this sort of weird painting here with these these women that's at the top of our stairs kind of a cool building we're in but dimension it out then we started to look like what can we see from our office and this is where as planners and urban designers we were like we didn't think we could ignore it at first we thought years ago we about this we didn't think we'd be able to go outside we thought it would just be like the blinds were closed but with city engine and in in ArcGIS we thought boy we we can't just ignore the outside and let's see what we can do if we go out there so using GIS data from the city of Chicago I did this quick extrusion of of the buildings within downtown and then in City Engine did a quick view shed analysis to see how many buildings can we see within our within our level so what are we really talking about mapping ultimately we brought this back into our ArcGIS to select the facades so I want to say we went from 4200 buildings with what probably 12,000 facades down to about 600 facades I think was ultimately what would made it into the game so just a ton of optimization and then we looked at the street without the street was important and this is where we learned a lot about texturing we created this texture by hand in Photoshop kind of destroyed it started with with just pavement painted all those white stripes by hand erased them by hand kind of made them look beaten in Warren I mentioned earlier the key to drawing is being able to see and when you start to look at things you start to notice all the imperfections those are the things that really help sell sell a graphic and sell a visualization so we started to kind of sketch out the buildings and how they were all sort of tiled together with the textures would look like and ultimately you know we started to model out the interior of our space and this is some final render or final product outside of looking at our office building some of the this is now all the city and should work and then there's a quick little fly through so yeah using Sketchup on the interior 3d work a lot of Photoshop work creating the textures and I'll say that's the biggest lesson we learned through this is how important textures are I think I used to try and do everything with CGA and every little extrusion seeing how well a normal map can make a flat surface look 3d it's incredible and so we learned a lot in doing this and really when you see when we get out onto the street outside of our office some of the just they're really cool work we're able to do with textures and texture mapping onto a 3d environment we created with City Engine there's a little a little shout-out to City Incheon right there in that building it will go up on the El tracks so we've shown this these drawings in a couple conferences I don't know if you've seen them I'll let you know a little secret on all of these images that we've shown if you just sort of zoom out a bit there's the XM actual gameplay going on it's tough to capture gameplay on this engine without seeing what's really happening so give you an idea of this level we built we you know sitting here throwing a bomb on our desk this is one of the bomb sites it's a you're trying to blow up a master plan proposal here's that that vacant storefront we dressed up with you know they really just give me some homage there's just some total carnage at the at the end and even we say even up close the the level looks great and plays well but key to all of this is the texturing so that that texture this is that that road you can see here in Photoshop it's just a layer it's actually this image is half and what I did is I doubled the height of it mirrored it twisted see see this blemish on the pavement here it's here what it did is it gave us a nice seam in the middle of a road and you'll notice that if you look at a white Street it's not just a clean sheet of payment there's always sort of seams as the as they build it and then we put on the paint and we destroyed it we added this is just a burn tool we went in and we erased with the brush tool started to erase this stuff so it wasn't perfect so it looked like it was doing and so here is a view outside of our office again look at the crosswalk you can see it's been eaten away by snow there's no perfect rectangle on any of these painted areas and so when I show you what our 3d view is we really did our best to kind of mimic the the real area this street is was brand new at the time you can see there's that burnt-out area that we did I sit right here and look out over this all day and I can't get to see it and we're able to kind of come in and in and match it I think pretty remarkably well so one of the things we're doing now taking all those lessons that we're bringing them right back into city engine I'm building out these Street the street files so here is just pavement and what I've done is I've created this coding system where you can see I have a one as a solid line to is a dashed white line three solid yellow 4 is - yellow and so that one indicates what's happening on the top 2 is what's happening in the middle and then 3 what's happening on the right edge so 3 - 3 is a solid yellow line and 1-1 that's a solid white line and then in the middle I've - one is tire wear - two are cracks - three as a manhole so I created the system inside of Photoshop and then I exported all of these JPEGs along with normal Maps and the bump maps and this is my key inside of my CGA so here's my street texture naming guidelines left side if it says zero there's no paint so Lane - xxx goes corresponds exactly to this so zero to three would be no paint on the left side two in the middle and three on the outside so 2 in the middle is cracks and three is solid yellow inside of city engine just some probability we have a slider for cracks a slider for manual as a slider for patches we're passing along a couple of parameters so we're figure out what direction the lane is headed and then where the lane is if it's in the middle so if it's a single lane and inter lane a middle lane and then we're going here to get the road texture and so here all we're doing is building what that JPEG is going to be lane with that left number is what the right number is and so inside of city engine this is sort of what it starts to look like as we sort of and I can tell you I've looked at a lot of streets been to a lot of cities there's very few pristine pieces of pavement out there with with none of this this deterioration so where we're headed we're adding just I think we've passed the threshold where we know to make a scene entirely realistic we got to add the details so we'll be extending drawings like this and we're adding in all of the different little things so we're constantly assessing what we've looked at and and looking for ways to add additional realism and as we bring them into these engines like unreal in these gaming edges to have the textures already generated for us in City Engine is so key because it makes that work that workflow so much faster so with that I'd just like to thank everyone again for the opportunity hopefully enjoyed the presentation I wish I was there to see everyone's reaction is hopefully it's all it's all good and if you're looking to connect with me here's my website I'm on Twitter I'm on LinkedIn feel free to hit me up ask me any type of question you'd like I mentioned I'd share with you that ArcGIS online length there's a few different examples that you can look at and yeah thank you again thanks Matt Bruno Gabriel Pascal Dominic everyone over there and all these City Engine users all of us were doing so some work and thanks for the inspiration and hopefully I will see you next year if you're headed to the ESRI user conference I will be there I'll be exhibiting I'll be attending I'll be looking to connect with any city incheon user so be sure to look for me there as well thank you very much and have a great have a great conference

Channel: Houseal Lavigne Associates

Views: 2,758

Rating: 4.9310346 out of 5

Keywords: CityEngine, CEUM, CEUM 2019, vrbn, Houseal Lavigne

Id: xYbO9yGe5Fw

Length: 57min 46sec (3466 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019