Modeling a Massive Urban Environment with Procedural Inc's CityEngine

Modeling an entire cityscape or urban environment had been a very tedious task especially when high definition detail is required just like in movies, CG games and urban cinematics. Traditional urban modeling pipeline was modeling the buildings one at a time, cloning some structures and adding some modifications such as rotations, scaling, minor tweaks, and using the Greeble modifier. Even though with these techniques and plugins, the task is still heavy.

That is why Procedural Inc., a company literally started out of a University Laboratory in Zurich Switzerland composed of Software Engineers and Architects. In what was just a university laboratory programming, a Killer Technology 2009 as coined by 3D World magazine, the group of innovative minds had made a solution to the tedious task of urban city modeling/texturing through its program which uses procedural modeling algorithms. CityEngine 2009 was formed which quickly gained popularity among game developers, urban planners, film makers and architects and also gained the attention of big companies as Rockstar North, Volition, Foster+Partners, NAVTEQ, Microsoft, IBM, etc. universities like MIT, Stanford, Brown or Max Plank. CityEngine is not only applicable to games and movies but very useful for scientific applications too.

"Urban city modeling had never been this easy." as stated by Procedural Inc CEO Pascal Mueller.

Key Highlights of the CityEngine 2009

#1: Interactive Editing Capabilities (manipulation tools with immediate generation mode)

#2: Floating License (enables flexible network licensing installations)

#3: Support for Geospatial Data (aggregation of GIS data to model 3D cities)

#4: Reporting Functionality (visualization of master plans with corresponding Excel tables)

#5: Improved 3D Export Functionalities (3ds Max, FBX, Collada, Massive Software etc.)

#6: New Additional City Examples (available for instant out-of-the-box modeling)

For more information, visit Procedural Inc's website

Download their free trial at