Getting started

Question

I've downloaded trial of City Engine and am keen to throw some test data into the software to see how it performs.

I have a shape file which contains polygons depicting the footprint of individual units in a block of apartments.  The attribution of the shape file is as follows:

UNITNUMBER (int)
FLOORLEVEL (int)
FLOORHEIGHT (int)
FORSALE (boolean)

The apartment block consists of three floors (FLOORLEVEL is either 0, 1 or 2) and the FLOORHEIGHT is always 10 (feet).  I'd like to colour the units red or green depending on whether the unit is for sale or not.

Can someone advise me how best to get started?

many thanks

JoanneO_Brien · Answer

Colourising each floor shouldn't be an issue. In the example I showed earlier, if you continued the code for each floor you should just need to apply the colour then, just make sure you take the full stop out so that it continues the code further eg:ACont--> color("#FFFFFF")
BCont-->color("#FF0000") etc

hope it sorts itself out! 🙂

MattO_Keeffe1 · Answer

That's really useful, thank you.

Any reason why I wouldn't be able to colour anything above the first floor?

JoanneO_Brien · Answer

That shouldn't be too hard. If you try something like a simple block form first, you can use the same rule for all three parcels just say:attr UNITNUMBER = 0 # these link to the attributes in your attribut table
attr FLOORLEVEL = 0
attr FLOORHEIGHT =10
const unitScale = 0.3048 # this is for the conversion from feet to metres

attr FloorHeight_metres = FLOORHEIGHT*unitScale
Lot--> case FLOORLEVEL == 1 : A
  case  FLOORLEVEL == 2 : B
 case  FLOORLEVEL == 3 : C
 else: NIL

A--> extrude(FloorHeight_metres) ACont.
B--> extrude(FloorHeight_metres*FLOORLEVEL) split(y){FloorHeight_metres : NIL | ~1 : BCont.}
C-->  extrude(FloorHeight_metres*FLOORLEVEL) split(y){FloorHeight_metres*(FLOORLEVEL-1) : NIL | ~1 : BCont.}

That's just one potential way to do it, although there would be plenty of others. In this what you're doing is saying that for each parcel which has the attribute of a certain floor level you're extruding by that number of floorheights and then all the floorheights under the floor you're interested in are NIL (therefore nothing appears) and continue the code from there.

I haven't tested the code and you can play around for a better and more generic way depending on what you want but the principle is the same! Good luck 🙂