ESRI and the VES present "Common VFX Workflows with CityEngine and Houdini"

okay welcome everybody to our first webinar called common VFX workflows in city engine and loudini thank you all of you for joining us today this one-hour webinar will feature product specialists from ESRI as well as a user story from Le ensel formerly of Framestore now currently groom and character effects TD at one of us joining us from ESRI is tisha urbeats seus 3d evangelist and Simon Hagler who is a senior software developer so hope you guys are excited and ready to learn some cool city engine tool tricks and I'm gonna kick it off to tisha all right okay so let's do this shame ice cream can someone let me know if they can see this looks good cool all right so yeah hi everyone I'm Tasha as John mentioned I am a 3d technology evangelist at every and I'm really excited to be part of this webinar today so thank you that you all took the time to join us today and thanks a lot to the ves for giving us this opportunity so yeah I'm gonna talk to you for a couple of minutes first up on what city engine actually is on on a high level and then Simon will take over and dive a bit deeper into the more technical stuff and then LEL finish off his webinar with a city engine use case for Netflix's the witch so yeah let's start by getting the ball rolling with a couple of clips showcasing some city engine work in the entertainment industry [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so I hope that all played back for everyone more or less okay but I think we're all pretty used to the zoom video quality by now so what is city engine so city engine it's a procedural so procedural means parametric rule based 3d modeling software that allows us to to generate accurate data-driven representations of cities and surrounding areas but also to create real and fictional cities from scratch so City engines typically used to model urban environments and it's commonly used in in like architecture and urban design and visualization in those sorts of fields but obviously and yeah that's the reason why we're all here today City engines also used to create city environments for the entertainment industry so how does it work at a high level a typical City Engine workflow will look something like this so on the left here we start off with our data sources and there's lots of different data sources available to you either through every or through available open data so that means that it's data that's that's freely available or also through our partner companies and then moving one step on you bring this data into city engine and city engine will create the different features for you so then to visualize your data more realistically if you move one step further again to the right we'll apply something called rules so the unique city engine scripting language is called CGA that stands for computer-generated architecture and with into the engine we have some rules that are already available for you but you can also easily script your own ones too depending on what your requirements are and then final step there you can output your models to a variety of different formats and yet today we're obviously be looking into one particular use case with Houdini the way that we typically create 3d models in city engines starts by bringing in 2d shapes or building footprints and then applying the CG rulz onto the shapes to create the 3d model and if the data that you've brought in already has attributes then City Engine can use those attributes to determine what the resulting 3d model will look like and yet the great thing about working procedurally is that you can tweak the rule and regenerate your model and work through this sort of iterative process until you get the result that you're after so yeah maybe you're asking yourself so why should I use City Engine I'm gonna pose a question here so how hard is it actually to model a city I'm gonna try and answer this one as best I can so I'll start off with the buildings so if we take for example Redlands which is a small town where the ESRI headquarters are located which is about one hour east of LA and the population bears around 70,000 people but it already has 26,000 or over 26,000 buildings next examples Orlando so that has a population of around a quarter of a million people and it already has over a hundred thousand buildings or the third biggest city in the u.s. Chicago has over a million buildings with a population of around three million people so in total for the US we're looking at well over a hundred million buildings so then let's quickly calculate how long it would take us if we were trying to manually model these buildings so if we assume that you can model one building in about 15 minutes give or take then even even then you'd need to invest 6500 hours to model a small town like Redlands for Orlando it would be 14 man years of work or 27,500 hours and then if you did a model a city like Chicago it's a whopping 300 thousand hours or a hundred and fifty men years but yeah that's not all that there is to do it doesn't stop there a city has more than just building so a city also includes things like facades and lights and windows streets street furniture roofs tops all those things and so yeah this can easily become a pretty time-consuming and very tedious production task so yeah that's kind of why it makes sense to use smart technology instead of tedious manual labor so in this diagram here you can see on the y-axis you have the total cost or hours and then on the x-axis you've got the amount quality of content or design so instead of having this relationship of more buildings more time correlation we can break it by using procedural technology so then yeah we first defined the rules and the libraries and things that I just briefly touched on before so that we can create these beautiful cities with thousands and thousands of buildings without adding all the extra time and yeah I'm just going to quickly show to user examples here my first one is from big hero six so yeah this is based on real parcel data from San Francisco it's around 83,000 buildings and yet then at some point the director wanted to exaggerate the topography and so using procedural techniques and the terrain was exaggerated one and a half times and then the city was regenerated and so that obviously made for a much less time-consuming workflow by doing it that way and the next thing here is is Zootopia so the vibes for Zootopia and I'm probably some people in the call here actually worked on this but so correct me if I'm wrong then but yeah it's a device for Zootopia was although it's a fictional city it should feel like a real city so yeah again real world parcel data was used and then from from this like the streets and the city layouts and things like that were built out so the idea behind this workflow was really to work with sort of real GeoDesign principles and to make the city feel as believable as possible so yeah that's that's my part at this stage I'd like to hand to Simon and you grab control yeah yeah yeah let me switch to my traduction airy slides okay can you see that fine looking good okay so everybody a name is Simon I'm a software developer and the city engine product team and I have like two two parts here to present to you I'm first they're going to quickly establish a bit a deeper look into city engine UI and then we'll talk about the two most common VFX workflows we saw or we see in our customer base and then I'm gonna take you into a hands-on demo how we transport city engine scenes through USD into Houdini and what the possibilities are there so I'm this is city engine desktop application it's very similar concept as you know from motor tools like Maya & Co you have on the left upper side you have seen layers on the lower side you have your file browsers on the right hand side you have an inspector so that's common concepts and then in the in the middle yeah that's the a procedurally based urban planning scene and basically using the the component stash I introduced before so GIS and parcels layers terrain layers and then procedural modeling so the geometry you see or even the trees and everything this is placed in this scene by scripting so by a procedural language the CGA as introduced by Tasha and then just to give an example that's then how such a scene looks for example in this case we exported it to unreal and did a simple camera move here and that scene I will come back to that and we'll use it as a basis to export it to Houdini through USD let's take a step back here and look at the VFX workflow with CGI engine order from a very high it's like bird's eye view from there it's actually very similar to two other packages you import data you edit them you export data you have layers as in Photoshop Ramaiah the special thing about CD engine in terms of layers is that these are actually all connected so if you change the terrain here you can choose that your streets will automatically adapt to change terrain and therefore also your buildings will adapt to the changed streets I will show you that in a second in the second part I mean and then you can export to whatever pipeline tool you need so we see kind of two basic workflows in our customer base to deal with CGI engine generated environments on the left hand side or let's start at the top so what's common to them both is exporting elevation maps or terrains as grayscale bitmaps or quad meshes exporting street layouts as graphs through the excel performance like that parcels you could export as shapes even rules themselves so the CTA rules you wrote can be exported and used in some of our plugins but plugins that's probably the topic for a different webinar which I'm happy to do at some point so then on the lower left side a pattern we often see is that people generate the city fully in city engine and then they use our Python API to write a lightweight point file which is annotated so where each point is annotated with our transformation matrix with a studio or pipeline specific passed to the the hero asset things like that so I I guess a you know this concept from other packages as well and then on the other hand the people are also using the full geometry export with Alembic and now USD in the latest CD engine and what this enables is that you can export also the join tree which is very specific to CD engine so like streets sidewalks curbs roof Chua tree which depends again on the sidewalks around on the street layout all these things which are hard to pre model and just instance with a with our problem procedural language and obviously that's the logical reason is that people start to combine the two were close and use both so we look at some examples of these two and the mix so one of them is a station size show this zootopia there they basically use City Engine to lay out the whole city based on real parcel data that's these guys they're off obviously blend or blended over and unmodified and tweaked a bit and then they use the pre modeled asset a hero assets like these which were then instanced out or or layout it with CD engine so here's a screenshot of that you see all these pre model assets but they are placed and chosen by dzj modeling language and so by quickly playing around with random seeds you see that you can modify the scene quite drastically or some parcels and that's that's one of the strengths of CD engine here to kind of be this this layout engine almost and then these are a few shots from Zootopia where city engine was used in the background to fill up this little the city environment same year also here in the background and again here you saw this video from Toy Show oops I just want to pause it maybe there so here in big hero 6 these I did a similar thing they remodeled kind of floor components so this roof this floor it's hard to see this floor they were all modeled in a way that they can be combined in various ways using the language again CGA and so that allowed them to have a lot of variation and or variation enough for a background buildings in the shots you saw earlier now do you on the other side we have workflows we've just used geometry or directly from CG engine so this one here I believe they even used our old random and exporter and actually used random n2 them fur to process the data and this is really a as a developer I was like astonished because render man is not really a format for interchange but to render by the high school they pulled it off great stuff and also Total Recall used to workflow completely and with geometry from City Engine and then the mixed workflow which is probably the most interesting one and a powerful one so for regarding guardians of the galaxy they used this hybrid approach they did the layout concept art brought it over into city engine they had this concept of density boxes building shells high resolution chewy tree and textured or shaded Joey tree and they use these to kind of build up the city so they had these boxes density boxes for hero buildings so they just used the extrude command and city engine to kind of get a feel for the hero area and how dense it would look and then they use the pre model building shells and distributed them again with the CGA language and for the for the rest before for the streets and things they directly exported the geometry from C PNG and that's one of the final shots so as usual with our nice City layout sort of it is hid behind we effects explosions and smoke but that's that's just how it is right cities always seem to be destroyed these days all right now it's time to switch gears I'm gonna switch to my video presentation let me just switch to my video player here and now I would like to talk to you hands on how one can export from city engine and go into Houdini and I will use the urban planning scene I showed you just before the beginning so let's get this started the dis demonstration is based on a city planning project this was done by our virtual reality and Marcus urban product teams as we aren't is Erick we could obviously have used some the procedure power of cities you do need to create some crazy sci-fi city as well but I place this demonstration at the border between urban planning and we effects because it reflects in a way what we see often our customer base that many moving move your game productions these days are actually starting with real-world data a special thanks goes to you Anna metropolis for all her work on these building designs and did the ECG engine work there so this project is about we develop in Dorchester Avenue in South Boston I hope I pronounce this correctly the basic idea was to improve walkability public transport and have more green spaces so inspired by this we took the raw GIS data provided by the urban planning department of the city of Boston and enhanced it with City engine with our own building designs and in the original project we exported it to Unreal Engine and he now I would like to show you how this is basically feasible to or how to repeat this process from City Engine two Houdini through USD so we start the CD engine scene by importing the raw is data provided by the post in urban planning department this will allow us to correctly Chi reference the scene in case you want to align more data later on so it's useful to state your reference in CD engine as long as possible for such scenes in this case we start we start with large polygons which gives us the boundaries for ground water and greenery so these are trust references they will not show up in the final scene there are many approaches to set up a city layout with city engine in this case is we will use satellite imagery to trace some Street around Dorchester Avenue in Boston and use the resulting parcels to apply our building designs written in CD engines CGA language for this we have this handy feature called get map data which will take the current location of scene on the world and Korean ESRI cloud service which will provide elevation and satellite images so by providing an extent the cloud service will generate the corresponding images and situation then will download them and import them into the scene as map layer type you can adjust the resolutions for the image and evaluation sorry elevation maps individually the resulting layer contains a satellite image draped over a quad mesh with elevation so Boston is relatively flat so the elevation is a bit hard to see if we look from the side there's a tiny little hill there so now it's time to have a first export to UST to set up the USD side we select this new terror layer and choose the model export with the USD format you'll basically treat the terrain as a quad mesh model the USD exporter does not have many options by design the format is quite flexible and we implemented the broadly usable default behavior the most important option for chi reference scenes is to do is the global offset so to georeference them here we will Center the exported Cho entry around the origin to prevent precision issues in Houdini later on it is useful to round the offset to some rememberable value values and so we will be able to reuse them later in case you want to do more exports and so that everything aligns by default the US exporter will write a number of USD files with a fixed structure into the model directory we structured the export by CD engine layers and assets and tie it all together with a lightweight top-level USD file instanced assets will end up in separate USD files so they can be more flexibly reused Houdini we used the reference slope in the Solaris mode in the stage view so we browse to the models directory of the City Engine project and select the top-level model or USD file I should say so this will reference in all the data we write now this allows us to set up two cameras for example one for bird's eye view and one for a street level view or whatever we like in case you are wondering how Houdini found the satellite texture we make use of the built in USD preview surface material definition I will explain this in detail later after we finished creating the streets and building models within CD engine finally we put down a merge node and pipe it through some chroma render settings node as well so we are ready to render the scene at the end so now that we have some scene content we can also add some lights and just quickly see if Karma the USD specialist renderer is able to correctly light everything so usually a dome light and the direct light for the Sun so there are different ways now to create the street layouts in CD engine one starting point is to take a look a tutorial for of CD engine which explains how streets can be imported from various data sources here I'm going to take a different route and manually trace some streets on the satellite image this is useful here as the number of streets is very small on larger scenes it of course more useful to import the streets but this might involve some more worked and to massage the data sources as there are not really worldwide standards on how cities store their day Street data so we're placing at the camera in two orthogonal mode and pressing the Y key to look directly from above we can start to trace the street city engineer will choose some default values for the street and sidewalk with but those can be adjusted later on as well as only the crossing points are aligned to the terrain we might see some later intersections but we can also fix those by adding more nodes or points and the land emitter terrain for now we just raise debate to have a nice view there are also special tools to edit Street and sidewalk widths now I start it's time to use the CTA rules so now we that we have basic Street shapes in place we can make them more interesting by generating actual geometry and detailed streets to save some time here we will make use of the Complete Streets rule which is a kindly provided for free by our community member David was among this is available on github the streets polygons are set up by default with the necessary start rules so the names for the rules for Street sidewalk and crossing shapes this means David's rules will work out of the box we can just drag and drop the rule file on to the shapes David's rules also come with a large number of parameters for example we can choose to have parking spots on the street hmm we can use the selection utilities to apply the rules for different shape types at once these tools are also handy for auto bulk changes like switching to a different rule file all together for many shapes so we select all shapes at the same same set of start rules and apply the rules in bulk and so we have now streets sidewalks and crossings so finally we end up with the Street View with cars and trees and it's all grated by the street complete street rule project the underlying Street graph edges and nodes remain editable and all derived geometry will adapt to changes so if we move for example a crossing node like here you relate the geometry and the current dynamic Street layer and it's connected Street rule will adapt and regenerate so this is then the full scene with some more parameters turned on for cars and vegetation before we can continue with the buildings though we need to set up the parcels for the building sit upon one approach is to refine the blocks which are automatically derived from the streets so we can do a loop detection and find the blocks between the street this example we make use of the building block subdivision schemes we have three hard-coded subdivision schemes the recursively offset and the skeleton subdivision these loosely kind of map to and practices from urban planners alternatively we could also use their rules themselves to subdivide the blocks into parcels for example there is a rule called split area which will create perpendicular cuts along a specialized direction a specified direction of course it's also possible to import or draw parcels direction a directly even with the attributes so to control this building generation afterwards we can always come back and adjust the subdivision of the blocks even after creating the buildings so now we come to the main feature of city engine which is the creation of procedural buildings based on the layers rigorously created as mentioned in the introduction we will leverage the set of rules written by our we are team for the Boston planning project the rule is modular in the sense that we can't really combine different envelopes volumes facades green spaces over different land uses the rule can also create landscapes parks and even interiors so let's go din you in CD engine by applying the rule on a parcel we first start with like of a landmark a high-rise building DSO called may see tower this is a fully procedural circular design which can also freely be adjusted in width and height for the rest of the parcels we'll use some more generic building rule certain buildings aspect are driven by random values so we can also regenerate these buildings with different random scenes so here I will now click on the regenerate button to use a different random seed and we'll see that the building design has a different upper floor design so let's switch that back there are many more parameters available for example there is one switch to change the level of detail of the greenery of the vegetation so here you see the building is regenerating with much higher density or detail vegetation models so now it's time to export this new content to Houdini again we use the same process as before select parts of the scene either in the layer lists in the upper left or directly in the viewport then we call up to use the model exporter again we again provide a base name and you reuse the same global offset settings as with the terrain so everything will line up in Houdini you might have noticed that we selected some empty parcels if these parcels have any rules that assigned the export will actually create the building geometry on the fly if it has not yet been created in the viewport this is a neat little trick to export large scenes without overloading your TP or system memory by the viewport let's switch over to Houdini on importance we add another reference slope and merge it with the rest we can select the top level file of our choice exported buildings files let's disable the tearin temporarily and keep feeding me some time to load the building you we go note that you have full freedom over the granularity of your exports you could choose to export everything in one go from city engine or layer by layer thanks to USD compositing the resulting singer off with loudini will be the same we can also quickly switch over to Carmen to a basic first check if it looks more or less as expected so you saw that we didn't have to do anything to get the materials in Houdini and this is thanks to this USD preview material which I want to explain real quick here so in general transporting materials and shading networks across applications is still a challenging thing there's often a mismatch in attribute semantics or problems with duplicate materials so luckily with roughness metallic PBO materials in CD engine and the matching people definition provided by USD this problem has been solved at least for this workflow here CD engine supports two material definitions our legacy default one and the new PBR one if the people is active in the rules then the our us exporter will automatically create the UST preview surface shader properties for each exported us deep object this leads to a seamless experience and the Houdini OpenGL viewport and the karma will just work also by adding L sorry you can inspect the materials by selecting a part of a building as you see here and then you can navigate to the material properties in this stage in the scene graph of Houdini so you see all the material properties there and this really scales well for large scenes also by adding a lot material library you can define your own USD preview surfaces or of course also production shaders and override parts of the CD engine model by using USD techniques like the collection based assignments and so on so here you see the properties of USD previous surface once more so now it's time to export a full scene which will conclude these demonstrations so these are additional buildings are just static meshes without without any materials from the Boston GIS database so this time we export everything at once and bring it into Houdini again it does not matter if you choose to export CD engine layers individually or everything at once we will have the same level of control in buddhini afterwards this export contains about 50 million polygons so medium small to medium scene well and it loads fairly quickly in the opengl viewport of Houdini it's certainly much faster than older formats if more advanced performance control is necessary you can also export CD engine twice thanks to CJ in low or high res mode and you slopes or tops to switch between the two finally we can switch over to Karma scene here and explore the scene a bit more note how you can still quickly hide certain buildings and also and so also in common want in karma mode sorry and to conclude my part here are some more final renders please excuse the missing sky here and yeah so after a few minutes of rendering this looks like this so it's really a seamless experience with materials and some more street-level views here this my part is done and would like to hand it over to Ellie to talk about The Witcher hello yes so in which in the picture we used a city engine which massively sped up the process along with Houdini there are only ten days to do this and the software's as well as lots of code helps massively and don't show a video hey John [Music] [Music] [Music] yes so state agent Houdini and Arnold were used with heightened as well as objects it's native to Houdini okay so this is the workflow overview it started off with liaison quit modeling again as we only had ten days modeling needed to create a variety of windows and doors to be used they exported three different file formats which were used in the software as expectedly and the reference we used was Carcassonne which is a fortified city with these South of France which is concentric my design I've used this idea with lower middle and upper tier style buildings in sintra so there are some things that the modeling department needed to keep in mind which is for example the pivot point had to be at the lower center of the building so that was Wendy Georgia was instanced in city engine the window it wasn't far away from the wall the naming was crucial we had assets type invariant which was what we needed and it was vital best that this was consistent as it was used common it was used to repeatedly in scripts throughout the process this is some more detail about the exported formats the proxy geometry was literally a bounding box and this was fed into city engine as an instance it was incredibly fast to use because there was only not many polygons the high poly job geometry was loaded in Houdini as Olympic instances pet geometry which only referenced one point in memory which meant the scenes were much like you are basically dealing with points which contained embedded data or when I switched to the instance files there are literally printing to the the ass file on disk the as well contains well Dayton it necessary to render the window door for example this is something that Simon earlier the idea of see tables so the scripts that I used yes main config and assess some of the file names of explanatory so the configuration file and I contained attribute data for say the width of the windows or the width of the doors so where a building was at lower style its might have less windows I mean my and the buildings might be tightly packed together the assets CGA contained hats to the directory of instance files to choose from and the main CDA contained wrangled everything together I see X Puetz rules and styles this is just a overview more Institute parts of the code me crazy code such were used and this what do you think wild cards to point to the proxy geometries which to modeling Department has made the configuration file specified the lower ground height and the chances of there being one story or two story etc so first our building might have sixty percent chance of having a fourth story treated and the main CDA far-right import both of these files and I got them together to create buildings of different types procedurally this is something that Simon also talks about briefly which was the parameters so the benefits of these parameters is that the devices could easily adjust these attributes without having to dive into the files that I showed previously and we have the will data is always a struggle if the scope is set to have a lower class style or middle class Telecaster and yes there's a class I'm going to make a building and then this will kind of waterfall into series of walls and if there's a instance such as a window or door that's okay I don't want to go it's this nice full world which is a pivot dummy so the pivot dummy was used to get the need to recreate the audience in Houdini and some data was also assigned to this parrot dummy such as the instance fell path and an ID which was particularly useful for the shutters so the modelers made roughly eight variants of a lower styled window with several shots which were either opened or closed to different amounts so using the CDM valued ransom - index and QD knee you could have more organic looking instances which yeah a building will never have all of it shutters closed this will have a variety of some opening closed shutters once the George who was exported out of City Engine has an Alembic in Houdini it was wrangled and separated into this geometry such as the doors windows other geometry which was like windows cornices to meet string pipes and the roof planes now that we've plates were especially interesting because the tiles were scattered in a probably nice way on top of the groups and replaced with an instance filed and honored in old instance and having so many tiles on all of these buildings added a really nice touch in a specular passes when lighting with the instance do the pivot do we recreated the audience um and the points could be you think Houdini's instancing you'd also visualize what it would look like and everything would be squished together into a collective mass file we pass into lighting now this is the end result so you can see the terracotta tiles which are also a Roman feature in the city of Carcassonne not distinct you and bell shaped buildings I think this is the middle class because it's mostly two to three tier buildings two to three flawed buildings and in the background you have more tightly packed lower class buildings so given that there are only ten days to create a city um thanks to fifty engine and Houdini they did and Arnold and they did an incredibly good job yeah thanks for listening to my presentation I'll stop talking I'll hand it to you guys great thank you - tisha Simon and le for a fantastic presentation we'd like to open it up to any q and A's that are coming through on zoom Q&A and also Facebook lives so please submit your questions and we'll have them answered for you would like to also point out that this recording will be posted shortly after the conclusion on the city engine TV YouTube channel so look for that and you can always replay again on the vs New York section Facebook group so we have few questions I came through so one is can you create rules for material assignment within city engine so I would like to take that it's for me I guess yeah so the material assignments are actually or the material properties I should say are like any other properties on on city energy models so you can fully control them with the CJ rule or language I should say and as mentioned I'm by switching to the the PPR material type it will then automatically create the USTA view surfaces in USD exporter and we'll just work in any USD consuming application down the pipeline it's great follow-up question very similar so it basically just plays off what Simon said is basically randomly assigned materials based off rules assuming that CJ rules have random animation built in it should be fairly straightforward yeah it's same it's the same technique you can use the the stochastic part or the random part of CGA to control any attribute including a materials I have a question while we're waiting for few more to come through given the industry adoption of the USD what was one of the challenges that you faced while going through the standards that is evolving actively within the community so specifically there are still a lot of kind of a bit of maturity issues I like I would say so d a lot of viewers of USD has a lot of problems with displaying the preview materials correctly otherwise actually it was pretty smooth sailing the the work by Pixar and co and partners is exceptional and the the API specification documentation is also very great and there is also a great community usually you got an answer is very fast if you posted a question to the USD in stressed mailing lists and like that yeah so that's that's from a point of view of a developer of course and I'm not the artist so I wouldn't know how its how it is to work good USD really on a really high-end production but I love to hear the feedback of course and as we have a very proficient artist here with us Ellie what was your experience with City Engine and getting up to speed to the point where you were ready to execute on a large-scale production so that was a second time is used City engine first time I used it in a very different way to get a similar to Blade Runner the first times I'd use it in sense that they were fitting buildings planning and synthesized using load of case else statements we didn't see tables that well learning curve I found very steep and probably took me about a month when I was a junior artist looking into this but then the second time around with cetera I felt like I was using it how it was meant for use like creating buildings from scratch you start stupid the scope you extruded upwards to each facade you would split and then assign instances cetera and I wasn't using the USD method of course or there was some other workflows that would have been much better but for ten days and to be able to look at the many tutorials um it's pretty good the second time around okay we have a question actually two parts coming in that says how do you get the buildings to have the doors facing onto the street is there a built in function that points the quote front of the building to the street or do you create your own script so what's usually been done is that buildings are modeled pre pre model buildings are mold in a way that they have like a convention so the front is like the along the x-axis and then you have tools in the engine to get to that x-axis or orient the parcels with the x-axis the local one to the street and then if you put down the building it will look at the right way and maybe just to expand on that you can also query like proportions and things from such assets so you can also choose between multiple options if you have like seven pre model buildings and so you can choose the one which has the best proportion for a certain parcel okay that leads to a second question which deals with how do you deal with buildings that are supposed to be butted up right next to one another like New York City tenement buildings so so really lots of buildings and you just extrude normally and without any setback there's a setback function which you can use um yeah so you continue seven got me there so what you can also do in CGA is you can query between buildings we call that um occlusion checks so you can actually if you want to build that balconies in one building you can actually first check if there's not a another building in the way and then you can leave out that balcony in that case great and also checking to see if any of our viewers on Facebook live have posted as Allie mentioned there is a multitude of great tutorials available primarily one of the best resources to check out is the city Engine TV YouTube channel Teesha does a fantastic job of curating content on there we will be providing a link very shortly but that is probably the first place you should check besides the wonderful documentation and as a city engine evaluator I must say kudos to the documentation writers is always very thorough kept very up to date with the latest advancements so yes so definitely city engine resources page I'm guessing that's also what you're referring to with the documentation and the YouTube channel you want to just kind of yeah see a few tutorials obviously live on YouTube or also yeah I have like a I guess I'm trying to find like tips and tricks and things like that things that are interesting or could be interesting so I'm also always interested in feedback from people what you actually want to see on that channel that might be more helpful and should also mention that the ESRI user conference is coming up virtually this year it will be held from July 13th to the 16th so wonderful developments and new discussions to take place there so if anyone is interested they can check out ESRI Ezra's user conference page we have a question from Facebook which is are there any changes in licensing coming in the future indie licenses perhaps look as far as I know to be honest but they're not really not really deeply involved in that part of the product so I would we can certainly check on that and get back to this um to the person who put the question before I give any wrong answer I would like to check first well we should also say that there are currently evaluations available for City Engine and that will segue us towards the end of our webinar here we are also hoping to provide a additional part in this particular series taking a deeper dive looking into the workflow within Houdini with the Palladio toolkit plugin toolkit which provides direct access to city engine data from within the procedural network of Houdini scenes and we'd also like to get your feedback and see if there's any interest in seeing some interoperability discussions and features you'd like to see with City engine and game engines so please we will be sending out a questionnaire following the webinar and if you'd like to provide any critique or anything you'd like to see please send us that information and with that I will post this final image for everyone basking where they can find the recording the recording will be available on the city Engine TV YouTube channel and we will also provide that link out but I want to thank everyone our panelists for joining us today you can reach them at their email addresses and you also see the release highlight notes for City Engine 2020 Ellie's website listing her work as well as a vs New York contact information so all this will be sent out to all of our attendees so once again I want to thank all our panelists and thank all our attendees and see you soon thank you John for recognizing yep thank you John and thanks to everyone who joined today thanks for your time yep think something silly thank you all okay

Channel: CityEngineTV

Views: 2,509

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: CityEngine GIS Modeling 3D, CityEngine, Tutorial, 3D, Smart 3D City Models, Esri, Modeling, Essential Skills, GIS, Smart 3D City, 3D City

Id: CV1v9ZwLooE

Length: 57min 13sec (3433 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020