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Rhino 3D to CityEngine to Twinmotion

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10-09-2023 10:47 AM
JustinEstanislao
by
New Contributor
‎10-09-2023 10:47 AM

Hi everyone! 

I'm looking to create a Virtual Reality scene in CityEngine that I hope to then render in Twinmotion.

I'm currently running into the issue of not being able to export my terrain elevation from CityEngine into Twinmotion. Right now, I'm manually sculpting it in Twinmotion, which is tedious, inefficient, and inaccurate. 

I created a patch in Rhino 7 with the contour lines of my focus area. I tried to export this as a Twinmotion file. While it opens in Twinmotion, the coordinates do not line up with the geometries I've imported from CityEngine, and I haven't been able to find a way to move it to where my other objects are. 

Ultimately, I have two questions:

1) Is there a way to export a geometry from Rhino as a Heightmap so I can set it as my terrain in CityEngine to then export into Twinmotion?

OR

2) Is there a way to treat a shape in CityEngine as a terrain and then align objects to that? 

Thank you all so much for your help. I hope I don't sound too crazy. 

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1 Reply
JonasObertuefer
by Esri Contributor
Esri Contributor
‎10-10-2023 12:17 AM

Hi @JustinEstanislao,

We have a blog post covering the workflow exporting CityEngine terrains into Twinmotion: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-cityengine-blog/export-terrains-from-cityengine-to-twinmotion/b... there you might also find some general tips how to deal with heightmaps in Twinmotion.

Regarding your questions:

1) Pretty sure this can be done one way or another. One thing that comes to my mind is to setup a viewport from top and set it to shaded and then capture that. But I am not an rhino expert and I suggest you trying to get answer for this question in the Rhino forums.

2) This is not possible directly in CityEngine. If you have contour lines I would suggest to export them into ArcGIS pro and then use the geoprocessing tools to create a raster heightmap there (Create TIN, TIN to raster) and then import the raster as a terrain into CityEngine

Are you working georeferenced in Rhino / CityEngine? If yes, you could try to download the heightmap directly for your location in CityEngine using Get Map Data.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,
Jonas

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