1. Exploration of ESRI’S CityEngine

2. What is Esri CityEngine Stand alone software package Allows for rapid generation of cities/urban environments Allows for thematic city designing using procedural rules and 2d data Public Interface, provides transition view on possible city development

3. CityEngine Versus 3D Software Ability to store libraries of rules which allows for a quick city design This allows the user to generate multiple Design Scenarios Compare Designs with Ease Urban Scale

4. Subject Matter: Century Engineering Headquarters, Hunt Valley, MD Information/Data was readily available Sr. Management and marketing interests in having a 3D visualization of office Designing a building inside and out would allow for a slightly more complex design compared to just setting up a default city block

5. Thought Process / Work Flow: All Data available for the project were stored in Microstation.DGN file format A workflow was developed in order to process/filter the data before being used inside CityEngine Each floor had to be georeferenced, converted in a database, Filtered, Dissolved, multipart to single part, and reviewed for any topological errors.

6. Creating the Visualization Procedural rules were created utilizing the column attributes mentioned above. Height, Wall type, floor, etc. attribute columns were added to the data inside the geodatabase Glass frames were created using cga for the front entrance of the building

7. Final Product CityEngine software has also added a great way to share 3D model over the web without any requirement on the end user (other than modern browser) An ArcGIS Online account is needed to host the Web GUI

8. Problems Encountered The first attempt I broke out each floor into separate categories Ex. Interior wall, Exterior wall, cube wall, brick wall, etc. This ended up with a massive collection of procedural rules along with shapefiles. (performance suffered) Upon further exploration I learned that you could write rules that can read attribute information directly from a geodatabase Textures were another problem, at least using textures from pictures that I had taken.

9. Summary Using this software was surprisingly intuitive and the help guide gave plenty of examples of each procedural rule did. The Web viewer was fast informative and definitely worth purchasing an ArcGIS Online account along with the CityEngine software Software was easy to navigate, a great library of examples, and a knowledgeable/active user community. f http://centuryeng.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=6dac73b1c11849f3b4725e79c48e98b6

10. Screenshot