I see it being a good tool if you can plug in your own prefab pieces and have it build a whole city with them
I watched one of the vids on the site, and the dude demoed building a futuristic New York City based on a matte painting from Fifth Element.
At one point he switched to his Maya scene where he had a bunch of polygon primitives which CityEngine was using to auto-generate his city. So I assume you'd be able to plug in your own prefabs, as the main thing you're buying is the app that just puts it all together.
Its pretty cool stuff.
I was also thinking about how great an organic city - like a treehouse village or something would bennifit from instanced geometry placement in an engine like this! so I took a look on their forums;
it looks like its not as easy as all that to get instanced geometry in the engine properly - CityEngineForumTopic
apparently the engine will import the .obj or even FBX (UV's are preserved in and out of CE back to Max - ), but unless you want to deal with each building lot separately to retain the proper scale of what is being imported into it - the engine will scale the .obj to the lots without maintaining proper aspect.... There may be some work around where you scale all the lots to the same size, but thats starting to boarder on useless?
the engine uses a scripting language called cga or something - and the mods of the forum suggest learning the language to deal with teh scaling issues :S...
Downloaded it anyway though, looks promising even for random experiment to get ideas on new building placements or something - similar to alchemy thumbnails IMO
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Think this will replace environment artist or change that role on some scale?
no
At one point he switched to his Maya scene where he had a bunch of polygon primitives which CityEngine was using to auto-generate his city. So I assume you'd be able to plug in your own prefabs, as the main thing you're buying is the app that just puts it all together.
Its pretty cool stuff.
http://www.procedural.com/purchase/trial.html
it looks like its not as easy as all that to get instanced geometry in the engine properly - CityEngineForumTopic
apparently the engine will import the .obj or even FBX (UV's are preserved in and out of CE back to Max -
the engine uses a scripting language called cga or something - and the mods of the forum suggest learning the language to deal with teh scaling issues :S...
Downloaded it anyway though, looks promising even for random experiment to get ideas on new building placements or something - similar to alchemy thumbnails IMO