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Thanks for the link. I will be sure to post. To answer your question in one word - yes -I want to do something that would be very hard to implement - I am talking about that interaction between static and dynamic two-dimensional geometries - maybe specifically making static geometries into components of other static geometries and then making them dynamic? I know I can make static geometries dynamic by way of .obj manipulation, but that doesn't seem to be the right way to go in this case. I attached an image that shows a very rough idea of what I am getting at. I left one static building footprint blank so you can see it at the bottom. The footprint and the lot that surround it are seperate GIS data layers. Ideally I would like to get these two layers to interact. (all geometries shown are static GIS imports) Right now I can get my CGA to work for the lot (grass, trees, whatever - not shown), and I can get these little suburban typologies to populate on the building footprints (or on the lot geometries for that matter), but as far as CE goes I don't know how you would tell it to create a driveway on the lot geometry up to the right hand side of the housefootprint - how to tell one static geometry to do something that relates to another in its proximity? I would imagine you would have to create a line of code that queries all geometries that fall within its boundaries (is this possible?). Then subtract that area geometry from its own. Then search its internal geometry for the the right-most line - or actually look at the code for the inner geometry and find where my garage code lies). Another - perhaps easier - option would be to make the lot code as simple as possible (just grass or something) and make things like driveways, trees, mailboxes, whatever, as properties of the house footprint code - with object locations outside the bounds of the houes footprint. Problem with this is that those objects would still have to 'read' the lot geometry 'below' to know the extents to which they should populate. A last and perhaps obvious solution would be to change the GIS data itself... I am more comforable with CE than ArcGIS, so that is primarily why I put this one last. I still don't know how you could have a static shape relate to another one in GIS in a way that CE could understand it as such. Thanks for the help on this one Matt. I am sure a well educated coder will have an excellent solution beyond my rudeamentary skills. [ATTACH=CONFIG]27516[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]27516[/ATTACH]
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09-17-2013
08:40 AM
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Though I have been in and out of CityEngine for a couple months now, I am still new to all of this. Q: I have been developing some nice looking CGA codes for a variety of building typologies and have those placed on 'building footprints' from my imported GIS data for a suburban area (happy to post in a marketplace free as soon as available). In ArcMap, those footprints are on a separate layer from the lots (as I believe it typical in most city GIS data). Both the lot and footprint have a long list of attributes, visible in ArcMap attribute table. I get how I can place a single family residential building CGA code on a footprint, and that populates, and I have another code for say grass, fence, trees (suburban filler) that I can apply to the lots. My question is how I can make these two geometries interact within CityEngine? Can I manipulate the 2-D geometries of the footprint and lot at all? They seem to be static shapes since they are from a GIS data set. If I figure out how to manipulate the size or shape of the building footprint in CityEngine, can the features on the lot respond to this. In a way, it is like having a CE lot within a lot, and then having those interact. In the demos, there is only ever a lot, and a building is generally extruded from within part of that bounded area. I am probably missing something obvious. Thanks in advance for any tips or advice. This might all be to vague, so let me know if I should post something images or CGA's. Thanks!!! -ap-
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09-10-2013
09:07 AM
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Hi ! then, you forgot to define the filesearch as a 'const'. const buildingtex = fileRandom("assets/buildingtex/myFacade*.jpg") OH MAN! Thanks for this Matthias (though way old). I was searching forever to find a way to keep a random texture the same throughout the CGA code. The help contents needs a little ProTip specifying this. -ap-
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07-23-2013
12:54 PM
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By now this conversation is quite old, but it is exactly what I am working on and thinking about myself. I read Elliot's recent update on July CE updates, and that is really exciting. It sound like a lot of issues and frustrations are could be worked out in new updates. It sounds like maybe the starting GIS data that Elliot or Philippe have might be better organized than mine. In the attached screen shot, you can see that my building footprints don't really fit on my lots, and the streets are all independent of the lots. It is kind of a jumbled mess. Is there a way to make the lots run out to the extents of the street? Or the street to the lots? What is the best workflow from people's experience for cleaning up GIS data? Maybe better to work it in ArcMap first? At first I thought I would be primarily modeling buildings in CE, but the more I look at the model, the more it is actually about all the other stuff, like parking lots, trees, cars, sidewalks, ect. Thank you so much for the support on here! I am super amateur. Also - Elliot - you had posted a call for a bit of communal sharing of CGA codes for your initial populating of city scenes. Did that ever happen? Was there any sharing of CGA's? I saw that there may be a new marketplace aspect of the next CE that allows for sale, or general sharing of CGA's, which is cool. You posted about it here: http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/51652-Creating-a-City-from-GIS-data-Transport-Infrastructure Thank you !!!! [ATTACH=CONFIG]25204[/ATTACH] EDIT: So I started looking into my base files. If I leave only the streets in ArcMap, as a shapefile, they form lines that I could use to define as streets in CE, and then fill around with lots - then add building footprints. That would close the gaps and tidy up the model, but if I generated the lots, they wouldn't be right - so the question becomes, how do I use my lot shape file to inform but not define the lots in my CE file? Can I manually edit CE generated lot lines?
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06-11-2013
11:00 AM
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First of all, this is not meant as an angry rant :). I have been enjoying learning CE, and talking to people on the forums. I just wanted to throw some ideas out there from my experience of CE the last couple weeks which is not all that dissimilar from acadamymans. I have been struggling with issues similar to academyman - in that it is usually not a specific issue that is causing headache, but more the counter intuitiveness of the UI that becomes frustrating or how sometimes procedures seem to work and other times they don't (most likely from user error :). I would imagine the software is a work in progress, so hopefully some of these extra steps to accomplish simple tasks get ironed out. Right now it seems like there are too many different ways to get 'stuff' into the model. It seems like for every data set that you might want to import, there is a different way of getting it into the model (import, create new map layer, drag and drop) - which makes sense because the data is inherently different - but it seems like it could be simplified. For example, wouldn't it be great if I could just drag and materials from my assets folder right onto the surface of a building and have CE ask me if I want to apply to just this building or all buildings that are similar? Or if I want to have a random selection of materials, could I not select multiple textures. Or assume that whatever the projection of my first data import, all future imports will be the same projection. Same thing with the imports from Sketchup. I haven't tried it yet, but I can feel academyman's frustration that one cannot simply drag the file from the desktop into the viewport, and then be prompted as to where and what scale the model should be imported (automatically copying or cutting and pasting the file from the desktop into the CityEngine workspace.) Or if I have a rule in a folder in the CE workspace, it would be awesome to be able to just drag it from any other project right into my current scene and have that rule and all attached assets be copied automatically into the project that I am working on. (instead of getting "TEXTURE MISSING" written all over my building shape because I didn't copy all the other files that go with it). I guess what I might be getting at, is that this tool is extremely powerful with the right coding abilities, but it would be even more powerful if the viewports were interactive and but still procedural. Something for the future would be a way to 'code' without coding. Perhaps something like a building creation wizard that could be used to create .cga's through the viewport. Think sketchup that prompts you for thresholds. I think this was attemped in the 'visual' UI for coding, but it isn't exactly intuitive, and you cannot see what you are creating while you are doing it. As to the tutorials, they can be a little steep, I agree. I found that one of the most difficult parts of them was getting the data prepped before - through ArcMap. It would be nice if there was a better tutorial that very specifically addresses bridging the gap between software. It would also be awesome to get some tutorials on the coding syntax in general. I have a feeling many users will be coming into this with no coding experience, but could get it if they understood the basics of the language structure. That's all I got. Thanks for listening. Thanks Matt for keeping these forums running and for your help. I am sure these ideas are not new, and perhaps where CE is headed. My attention span is dangerously too low for CE - I want using it to be like using an I-Phone - but of course this comes at a price of perhaps losing some functionality. It will be hard to walk that line. THANKS!!! 🙂 🙂 🙂
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05-08-2013
09:07 AM
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thanks matt! yeah, i have very limited experience with arcmaps (or any GIS software for that matter). i think i can find someone to shore up my gis knowledge, and hopefully these will start to make a little more sense. thanks! -AP-
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04-30-2013
08:10 AM
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All right! I was able to get into the files with the update! Thanks again for sending me in the right direction on that. The problem now is that on the first 3 pages of the first tutorial, I am totally lost. Is there a video I am missing that actually shows the breakdown of what the PDF explains? It seems like there is a big jump from the 13 Tutorials describing CityEngine basics to these tutorials on workflow describing not so intuitive ArcCity procedures. For example the 1st PDF says: First we�??ll create random points within the building footprints and then create a TIN out of the lidar data. Next we add Z surface information to the randomized points and run a summary statistics to find the MAX_Z within each footprint and join the back to the original footprint feature class. I don't know what much of this means. Is it saying that the Building Heights from Lidar Tool does all of these things? Or am I supposed to be doing these things? If so, how? I am not looking for specific answers, because I will have issues like this with the whole tutorial, but more of a general answer on how I might go about learning how to understand these tutorials. My searches for more general GIS videos that might explain things like this have been not so fruitful. I want to learn!!! But maybe I cannot get there with just the online tutorials. Thanks in advance for any advice. -AP-
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04-24-2013
10:14 AM
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Thanks for the super fast response. I will be getting 10.1 this week, so no problem there. As always, Thanks! -AP-
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04-24-2013
07:50 AM
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Hey All (probably mostly Matt?), Sorry to bother you again. It seems like I take one step forward and two steps back. I have all 6 of the 3dCity zipped files unzipped and in separate folders. As per the directions in #1, I tried opening 3D City - Data Preparation. I have been getting an "ArcGIS Desktop has encountered a serious application error and is unable to continue" error on load. I tried downloading the zip file multiple times and extracting it in a variety of folders. I could not find a version requirement in the tutorial materials, so maybe this is the problem? I am running ArcScene 10 SP4. I also tried opening 3DCity Maintenance in the 3rd tutorial and found that it would not open due to a version problem - ArcMap 10 SP4. What do you guys think? -AP-
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04-23-2013
01:45 PM
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Matt, Brilliant! I have gone through a good portion of the tutorials, but there are even more here, which is fantastic! I had read that I would need to request access to the group in order to have access to the files, but I guess I thought it would be more like registering, than waiting for approval - which is probably why I couldn't seem to download the CE project. All is well now. Thanks for your help! -AP- Hi ! I'd recommend to go through all stuff here ( tutorial videos and workflow tutorials ) first, before diving in actual projects : http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/64843-CityEngine-Collection-RESOURCES-FAQ-HELP Concerning the Portland project : There's a way you can get access to it, but you have to request access to the ArcGIS online group named 'ArcGIS for 3D Cities': http://www.arcgis.com/home/groups.html Once activated, you can download the CE project of Portland here : http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=1d7e43f8ab3444609a40af573850c6e0 Ok ? Matt
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04-23-2013
08:12 AM
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Hey All, I am completely new to CityEngine (1 week of exploring). I would like to create something like the Portland Zoning Regulations application created for the web viewer - but in my copy of CityEngine. For me this means the easiest way would be to get a hold of the Portland Zoning Regulations files and open them in my copy of CityEngine and tear them apart a little bit - explore how they were made. Does anyone know if I can get the appropriate files that were used to make this online app? Thanks! -ap-
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04-18-2013
02:26 PM
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