CityEngine is a standalone software that provides professional users in entertainment, architecture, urban planning, GIS and general 3D content production with a unique conceptual design and modeling solution for the efficient creation of 3D cities and buildings.

CityEngine supports industry-standard formats such as ESRI Shapefile or DXF which allow to import/export any geo-spatial/vector data such as parcels, building footprints with arbitrary attributes, or line data to create street networks. See e.g. the Rotterdam showcase for an example.

To copy real cities or efficiently create an urban environment for your design, you can use data from OpenStreetMap. There you can download for free geospatial data of real cities and directly import it into CityEngine. See e.g. the Venice example.

An intuitive toolset is provided to interactively design, edit and modify urban layouts consisting of (curved) streets, blocks and parcels. Street construction or block subdivision is controlled via parametric interfaces, giving immediate visual feedback. See e.g. the Paris example.

CityEngine offers unique street grow tools to quickly design and construct urban layouts. Street patterns such as grid, organic or circular are available and the topography of the terrain is taken into account. See e.g. the future development area in the NYC2259 example.

Procedural modeling based on CGA rules offers unlimited possibilities to control mass, geometry assets, proportions, or texturing of buildings or streets on a city-wide scale. You can define your own rules using your own textures/models in the node- or text-based rule editor (as described in the tutorials).

Quickly create rules out of an image or a textured mass model with this simple and easy-to-use visual facade authoring tool. The resulting facade rules are size-independent, contain level-of-detail and can be extended with e.g. detailed window asset. Example workflow is presented in the Facade Wizard tutorial.

A convenient interface to interactively control specific street or building parameters such as the height or age (defined by the rules) is provided. And with the live mode, parameter modifications invoke the automatic regeneration of the 3D model. See e.g. the Modern Streets example or the Petronas Tower example.

Any parameter of the buildings and streets can be controlled globally via image maps (for example the building heights or the landuse-mix). This allows for intuitive city modeling and quick changes on a city-wide scale. Furthermore, terrains can be imported, aligned, and exported. See e.g. the Medieval Town example.

CityEngine supports Collada, Autodesk® FBX®, 3DS, Wavefront OBJ and e-on software's Vue, which allow for flawless 3D data exchange. FBX® and Collada support asset instancing, multiple UV-sets, grouping and binary encoding. Furthermore, scenes can also be exported to RenderMan® RIB or mental ray® MI format. Textures can be collected during (batch) export. Read more...

Customized rule-based reports can be generated to analyze the urban design e.g. automatically calculate quantities such as GFA, FAR, etc. Reports are updated automatically and instantaneously and can be made for whole city parts. More details can be found in the Reporting tutorial.

Streamline repetitive or pipeline-specific tasks with the integrated Python scripting interface e.g. write out arbitrary meta-data or instancing information for each building, import FBX® cameras etc. An example use case is demonstrated in the Unreal Engine import workflow.