Uses and users of CityEngine and CityEngine 2013

A recent article on Computer World outlined the use that had been made of CityEngine across a number of different industries. Recently, according to the article, the entertainment industry has used CityEngine to produce a number of cityscapes for films such as the latest reincarnation of Superman - Man of Steel, Cars 2 and Total Recall. Now, the pipeline for city generation should be made more efficient for this industry with the upcoming release of CityEngine 2013.

CityEngine 2013 sees the additon of an SDK (Software Development Kit) that will allow users of software such as Maya to procedurally generate models inside this software, instead of in CityEngine. The entertainment industry especially has pretty high standards when it comes to the quality of the visual output of CityEngine. Being able to marry up the procedural power of CityEngine and a high end graphics package like Maya we should be looking at some seriously awesome work.

The SDK is just one of a few small hints that Esri have released regarding CityEngine 2013. I have in the last week or so watched a few webinars through Directions Magazine. People such as Geoff Taylor and Eric Wittner have been bringing some of the latest information to the geospatial masses. There seems to be quite a few updates in the upcoming version but I've yet to see a clearly defined list of what's new.

It is obvious that Esri are having to service a number of different industries and so far the integration with the geospatial world has been steady. Obviously the SDK is made to service the entertainment industry. This got me thinking what industries would be the main users of CityEngine:

1. Government - Planning, Engineering, Architecture, Urban Design
2. Entertainment - Films, Advertising, Gaming
3. Military - Simulation

I'm pretty sure that there could be a wide range of other uses too. CityEngine is by name a city generation tool. However, many of the operations could be used to create all kinds of models based on any kind of input geometry. Making the operations work on a project that isn't city based could be a good way of showing the potential of other industries also using the software. I'll have to have a think about that and come up with something that is fun, will teach me some new techniques and that could be applicable to an industry.

Getting back to the Computer World article, Gert van Maren mentions some of the work that Auckland Council have done regarding a land resource document called the Unitary Plan. This is one of the major projects that I've been lucky enough to work on and I'll be reporting on some of the things I learnt in carrying out this project in upcoming posts.