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.

The Colosseum Viz: Bucharest, Romania by Uniform

Uniform have recently finished a short film on behalf of the Romanian real estate company Nova Imobiliare, the investment group behind The Colosseum project in Bucharest, Romania.

Uniform’s role was to develop a film that gave potential occupiers and customers a clear vision for this spectacular destination. The film had to create a ‘real experience’, telling the story of how the variety of infrastructure and spaces linked together, resulting in a film that provides a fantastic insight into this ‘colossus’ project and how it will look when it’s finished.

The Colosseum from Uniform on Vimeo.

Now visualising retail centres is not the easiest of jobs as all the new build shopping centres tend to have a similar look throughout the world. Notable here is the 'British Museum' style roof with hints of Vegas thrown into the standard retail blender. The project comprises of a 54 hectre site and includes 200,000m2 of mixed-use development, containing retail, restaurants, leisure facilities and a hotel. The scheme will be Central and Eastern Europe’s largest commercial development with a total value of € 350 million. We like Uniform's take on the pitch and it looks like Romania is about to have the opportunity for substantial retail therapy.

Leadwerks Engine for Architectural Visualisation

Its always good to see innovation in the field of real-time visualisation in relation to architectural projects. Our argument is usually not to go for the known route, the high priced software engines, but to explore other solutions for clients. As such it is really nice to see visualisation company Pure3d using the Leadwerks Editor.


The movie below details realtime rendering, for a french client with the purpose of selling real estates:

Pure3d's remit was to deliver a rendered movie template which could be used for further editing and audio overlay. The visualisation was based upon CAD floor plans which they used as a base for modeling and layout.

In terms of Interactivity, the project can be presented in a game like setting with realtime interactivity, this allows prospective purchasers to take a free look around the site and properties.

Rendering is quick with the source material movie output to 4000x3000px per frame in less than 30 minutes on a single workstation, this in turn means notable savings in production costs.

Head over to the Pure3d Leadwerks Meets Architecture blog for more info and screenshots.

Jan Jelinek & Visiomat: Modell Stadt Berlin

Below is a contemporary audiovisual collaboration between Jan Jelinek and Visiomat inc. It is possibly one of the most surreal we have featured on digital urban but with its imposing soundtrack it is almost hypnotic. Jan Jelinek’s approach is all about the transformation of sound, about translating parameters of popular music into abstract, reduced and textural electronics:



Bypassing the rules of traditional musicianship, he prefers to construct collages from tiny sound fragments, from the lost-and-found products of samplers, tape recorders, media players and other recording implements. To this end, Jan Jelinek often works with loops and slight modulations to distil the gist of a piece of music and define it more clearly while masking its original source.

Architectural Visualisation in Crysis (The Engine)

Vladymi, an architect from Ukraine, got in contact to let us know that as a result of some of our blog posts he has decided to move almost entirely to game engines for visualisation.

His current 'engine' of choice is the CryEngine2:



Vladymi makes the point that such engines allow A0 size renders in seconds and export movies at above HD resolution in near real-time. The work load is also minimal in importing models, whats not to like?

See the ArchMod site for more details.

Hermitage Plaza: Architectural Visualisation by Uniform

Uniform recently completed a short film for Foster + Partners, for their Hermitage Plaza scheme in La Defence, Paris. The film premiered to an audience including Vladimir Putin amongst others at the Russian National Exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.

The film was integral to the launch of the development's campaign for planning permission and also building an international profile. When complete in 2016, the two towers will be the tallest mixed-use towers in Western Europe, at a staggering 323m!



Hermitage's CEO Emin Iskenderov had strong ideas for the film so Uniform worked closely with him to create a series of sequences that not only told the story of the scale and the architecture but also attempted to show the Paris lifestyle that the towers will bring to an otherwise quite area of the city's business district.

Within an ambitious timescale, Uniform delivered two aerial film shoots over Paris, a large scale Green Screen shoot, they even managed to squeeze in a spaceship and we love it...

Times Avenue, Kuala Lumpur by metamosaic

The architectural visualisation below details Times Avenue, Kuala Lumpur. It is an exclusive corporate building that brings work and lifestyle together for a perfect working environment (that's marketing talk for you can live above the office).


The company behind the visualisation is metamosaic, a design studio setup in 2003 to focus on spatial visualization. We like the approach, the voice over is so calming and hypnotic we have just signed up for two flats, its going to be a long commute to work...