Design Cities Like LEGO: CityEngine 2025 Arrives Packed with New Features
The new CityEngine 2025 from Esri transforms urban design with its Street Designer, allowing you to create complete streets by simply dragging and dropping elements. Lanes, sidewalks, vegetation, and even streetlights are generated procedurally, taking urban environment generation to new levels of efficiency 🏙️.
"Now you can modify a lane or add vegetation as easily as changing a parameter in Houdini," explains an Esri developer.
Street Designer: The Dream of Every Digital Urban Planner
Key New Features:
- Visual editing of every street component
- Procedural library of urban furniture
- Integrated workflow with Maya, Houdini, and Unreal
- Enhanced rendering with antialiasing by default
Under-the-Hood Improvements
Other Important Updates:
- Visual CGA Editor with node search
- More realistic shadows in captures
- 3D Viewer optimization
- Greater integration with ArcGIS
The Elephant in the Room: The Subscription Model
Licensing Changes:
- Goodbye to perpetual licenses
- Only available with an ArcGIS Pro subscription
- Existing licenses maintain temporary support
- Mandatory migration in the long term
The bottom line: while CityEngine moves towards more powerful and intuitive tools, its business model follows the industry trend... even if it's still hard for us users to swallow. At least now we can drown our sorrows by designing the perfect street... with streetlights that actually work 😅.