#APPLY TEXTURE TO MULTIPATCH CITYENGINE SOFTWARE#

#APPLY TEXTURE TO MULTIPATCH CITYENGINE SOFTWARE#

Once the scene was imported to Unreal Engine, Benjamin Neukom, Software Engineer at Esri, made a few adjustments to materials and lighting. He adds that Esri was the first partner Epic worked with on improving the API, and that during iterative testing they improved export speed by more than 10x. “During the beta period, we worked directly with Esri to improve Datasmith,” says Pimentel. “It’s pretty much click and go.”Įxporting the favela model from CityEngineįavela model after import to Unreal Engine “The Datasmith exporter is written in a way that it’s not necessary to do anything special,” says Haegler. Models imported to CityEngine and distributed as instances, such as loose building materials, A/C units, and trash cans, were also converted to Unreal Engine instances by Datasmith. The Datasmith exporter takes CityEngine instances and translates them to Unreal Engine instances, reducing memory usage and optimizing real-time playback. Instanced CityEngine elements like foliage can easily send poly counts sky-high when treated as individual objects during export. This is an insurmountable barrier to experiencing the design-it needs to be interactive to reach the goal of an “experience”.ĭatasmith for CityEngine natively provides optimizations that facilitate real-time playback within Unreal Engine. Even with material reduction, each frame took 10-40 hours to render. In his 2014 video about the first favela model, he included a few stills rendered with Maxwell Render. In the first version of the model created in 2014, Buehler reduced the total number of materials in the scene by reusing them where possible. Rule-driven asset distribution on incidental scene elements Exporting the Favela When all models and instances were in place, the scene topped out at about 150 million polygons. After importing the models to CityEngine, the models were instanced and distributed using custom rules. Incidentals like pallets, bricks, buckets, and trash bags were created as low-poly models in Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D. Colors and even distress, cracks, and dirt can also be varied using rules.īecause building is always ongoing in a favela, loose building materials and tools are often lying around. Buehler prepared a number of textures for different types of facades, and used rules to combine and apply the textures based on building dimensions and other factors. CityEngine rules can control the size and appearance of buildings, streets, sidewalks, and foliage, and the distribution of other urban elements like telephone lines and trash cans.įavela’s procedural buildings, walkways, and foliage in CityEngine “We pushed all the knobs to eleven.” Creating a FavelaĬityEngine uses custom scripts (called rules) to lay out a neighborhood and populate the scene with procedural streets and buildings. “The favela project gave us an opportunity to really test the limits of CityEngine,” says Simon Haegler, Software Developer at Esri.

The advantage of using Unreal Engine is that you can then virtually experience the entire context of the design.”ĬityEngine’s developers were also involved in optimizing the workflow, and improved CityEngine to more directly match what Unreal Engine needed. “For an architect, placing their new design in the context of its surroundings is very valuable. “With CityEngine, you can not only have entire cities represented but also everything else around it,” says Pierre-Félix Breton, Senior Technical Product Manager at Epic. Epic first showed the integration of CityEngine and Datasmith at Siggraph 2017 when they worked with Esri and HOK (a well-known global design, architecture, engineering and planning firm) to create a demo of CityEngine and Unreal Engine, but wanted to use the favela project to push Datasmith’s capabilities even further. Datasmith reads the files exported from CityEngine and converts the entire scene for an optimized result in Unreal Engine. The favela model was exported to Unreal Engine via Datasmith, the CAD transfer tool in Epic’s new Unreal Studio.

Apply texture to multipatch cityengine