CityEngine: ESRI and Lumion a first look.

Yesterday a license for CityEngine landed on our desk from the nice people at ESRI and to be honest we were a little too excited for our own good, after all its only software. However, CityEngine and its integration with ESRI ArcGIS, while maintaining full export capabilities to load into 3DMax/Lumion/Unity etc, is a game changer.

It moves GIS visualisation a step forward while at the same time bringing procedural city modelling into the mainstream game engine world. Over the coming weeks we will be putting the software through its paces and exporting into Max/Lumion and Unity as part of introducing CityEngines onto our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation. The clip below details out first output direct from CityEngine into Lumion, adding in a general landscape, sample trees and transport objects:




Linking in our previous post on ArcGIS Twitter Visualisation in Lumion it seems that the worlds of GIS and architectural visualisation/game engines are finally starting to become accessible.

Data Space: Agent Based Models, SketchUp, Visualisation, ArcGIS and Lumion

Over the past few weeks we have been exploring exploring new methods and techniques for visualising data. Developed as part our Masters course in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation we are now looking into issues of scale, realtime rendering, rapid visualisation and 3D exhibition spaces.

Regular readers will know we have been exploring Unity due its interactive nature and ability to import various file types into its game engine (see Particles, Agents and Emergent Behaviour ). Unity is still an option but for rapid visualisation Lumion also offers distinct possibilities. The movie below details our first draft example of building an exhibition space (SketchUp), retexturing and adding various crowd/delegate models (3DMax) and the Twitter map (ArcGIS) using Lumion:




If Lumion offered a stand alone viewer rather than purely movie based output then it would be our engine of choice. As such it is currently a weigh up between Lumion and Unity, our Unity example is under development, we will post it soon as we can...

Second Life and Science Sim: Time to Head Back into Virtual Space(?)

Back in the heady days of 2008 when Neogeography was the 'in thing' we looked into importing geographic, urban and climate information within Second Life. Progress was swift and we demonstrated how output from ArcGIS could be not only imported but also manipulated on the fly, along with step inside panoramas and live data feeds:



That was 2008, since then our land with NATURE in Second Life has sadly timed out and nowadays its hard to justify resources to rent virtual space. As such our thoughts are tuning to OpenSim, nothing new there of course but the clip below from Intel has got us thinking.

The movie demonstrates the progress in scaling the capabilities of the ScienceSim virtual world and features a collection of projects aimed at expanding the web to include interactive 3D applications.



ScienceSim is interesting and with the possibility of running several 1000 avatars on a server brings about interesting possibilities for virtual simulations.

For more information, see www.sciencesim.com