Wednesday 14 July 2010

Arc GIS and CityEngine interoperability

I have used Arc GIS in the past to generate 3D urban areas from GIS .shp data and while the cartographic strengths of this leading package were apparent, it left a lot to be desired in terms of 3D modelling and manipulation, particularly when compared to a specialist package like 3D Studio Max.

An interesting new development however sees Procedural (the CityEngine developer), ESRI (the Arc GIS developer) and NVIDIA teaming upto set up a pipeline for the creation, analysis and visualization of 3D cities from 2D Arc GIS data. The video above demonstrates CityEngine usage for a model of the city of Rotterdam. This is a fairly important piece of news for researchers recreating 3D virtual cities from accurate geographical data, as the potential of putting together a pipeline with the leading packages in the field could be incredible.

1 comment:

grabjacket said...

This is a very interesting workflow. I'm wondering why they picked Rotterdam though.