CityEngine

Esri CityEngine

Original author(s)	Pascal Mueller, Simon Haegler, Andreas Ulmer, Simon Schubiger, Matthias Specht, Stefan Müller Arisona, Basil Weber
Developer(s)	Esri R&D Center Zurich
Initial release	August 2008
Stable release	2014.1 / September 15, 2014
Operating system	Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
Type	3D computer graphics, geodesign
License	Proprietary (Node-Locked or floating)
Website	www.esri.com/cityengine

Esri CityEngine is a three-dimensional (3D) modeling software application developed by Esri R&D Center Zurich (formerly Procedural Inc.) and is specialized in the generation of 3D urban environments. With the procedural modeling approach, CityEngine supports the creation of detailed large-scale 3D city models. CityEngine works with architectural object placement and arrangement in the same manner that VUE manages terrain, ecosystems and atmosphere mapping.

Procedural Inc. was acquired by Esri in the summer of 2011 ([1])

CityEngine was developed at ETH Zurich by the original author Pascal Mueller, co-founder and CEO of Procedural Inc. During his PhD research at ETH Computer Vision Lab, Mueller invented a number of techniques for procedural modeling of 3D architectural content which make up the foundation of CityEngine. In the 2001 Siggraph publication CityEngine was presented for the first time outside of the research community. Several more research papers have featured CityEngine since then.

In 2008, the first commercial version of CityEngine was released by the Swiss company Procedural Inc and is used by professionals in urban planning, architecture, visualization, game development, entertainment, GIS, archeology and cultural heritage.

GIS/CAD Data Support: Support for industry-standard formats such as Esri Shapefile, File Geodatabase and OpenStreetMap which allow to import/export any geo-spatial/vector data.