CityEngine Starter Project 1

Now that I had an idea of a simple project that would introduce me to creating my own rule file, I needed to set-up a project workspace and generate 2D data to use as base geometry. I will skip quickly through the set-up demonstrated here and spend more time in the next few posts going through the rule file generation in more detail.

To begin the starter project the first thing that I needed to do was to import some map layers that I could use as base data on which to work. I decided that I would use a randomly chosen greenfield site on which to build the models and it would also be interesting to build it on a DEM (Digital Elevation Model) or terrain.

From a geospatial perspective this is extremely easy as data that we use includes aerial photography and LiDAR generated DEM's. These are both imported as a JPG or TIF file and added to the Viewport window. CityEngine can be a little fussy when it comes to the type of JPG or TIF that you import. Simply they cannot be too large  (and the size depends on the actual coverage area and the resolution of the data). The area shown in the below image is roughly 2x2km and has a pixel size of 1 metre. This is quite high detail and I really don't think that in future I would use such high resolution data and will instead re-sample the data down.

I created a small road network within the black rectangle shown in the image above. I used the aerials to draw roads (rather than use the Grow Streets tool) which generated blocks from which a parcel network was created. After the road and parcel networks were complete I used the Align Graph to Terrain and Align Terrain to Shapes tools so that the data sat nicely on top of the DEM.

The image below shows the simple block arrangement of the roads and parcels. There are six blocks, five of which are residential and one that is commercial.

Block attributes for the residential parcels were set-up as shown in the image below.

That's pretty much the scene set. As the road and parcel network have been created entirely in CityEngine I will be able to utilise the operations in a very simple way. This will provide a good understanding how the operations work. When it comes to data that we import it becomes a little trickier (I'll show how to deal with some aspects of this in a later project). 

One point to note is that its clear that there are two distinct processes creating data within CityEngine. The first process is the import or generation of data used as base geometry. The second is the creation of a rule file that can be applied to the base geometry to generate models.

In the next post - Starter Project 2, I shall show how I began to create a rule file.