topic Reporting on leaf shapes in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

Reporting on leaf shapes

KennethLindhardt1 — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 14:18:43 GMT

Hi, I would like to ask if the following could be possible somehow.

In a lot I split the area into a building 2D shape a garden 2D shape and scattered points for trees. I actually create the entire 3D content, with windows, trees roofs and such report on all the geometries, and then removes the 3D content again.

I want it exported into leaf shapes, individual tree points with the correct reporting for that shape (tree height) or the subdivided building area with the different count of levels.

So exporting as leaf shape don’t seem to include reports, so I was wondering if could be possible to get the reports added to the leaf shapes somehow, and if anyone has an idea to do so?

Re: Reporting on leaf shapes

Anonymous User — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 14:42:56 GMT

This might help me to think about your workflow... How are you exporting it? To which format and end program?

Re: Reporting on leaf shapes

KennethLindhardt1 — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 19:51:33 GMT

Thanks, yes you are right.

I'm using esri file geodatabase as export (but it could be any export that holds attributes, and added into Arcgis pro, if I can get that far, I would be happy.

The end is grasshopper in rhino, but that would be some steps further.

Re: Reporting on leaf shapes

Anonymous User — Fri, 19 Mar 2021 21:33:35 GMT

@KennethLindhardt1

If I understand your question properly, you want to run a rule that generates new data about your site in 3D, but reverts to a 2D state, and then use that data to write to new attributes in the "leaf shape", from which you could export to a geodatabase format for downstream work?

I'm just diving into Python myself, hopefully someone with more experience in Python responds to you. But I think what you are looking for is python script based reporting. You can add instanced reporting on the "leaf shapes" rule attributes of your interest, write a python script to capture this data, run a python script based report, and then connect the resultant report back to an object/rule attribute.

Found this older thread with a lot of info on how to do this: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-cityengine-questions/joined-reporting-for-features-from-different-layers/td-p/228120/page/3

There's a draft python script in this thread, which I think needs a few modifications based on the comments to meet its initial goal, and a lot more changes to adjust to your desired goal, but this can get you closer to your answer.

In any case, I hope to learn more about this too, so I hope to follow and see if you get better answer from someone.

Edit: I think the linked thread was about modifying an attribute of a single shape's data to react to a selection of aggregated shape's data, done post-model-generation. So not exactly the same...

Re: Reporting on leaf shapes

JonasObertuefer — Wed, 26 May 2021 13:30:53 GMT

Hi @KennethLindhardt1,

Using the SLPK(Esri Scene Layer Package) exporter it should be possible to get leaf shapes including reports. In the exporter dialog set the following settings under "General Settings":

Emit Reports to true
Feature Granularity to One Feature Per Leaf Shape

I hope this helps.

Also, we will soon release a Rhino plugin for Rule Packages (RPK), this might be interesting for your workflow.

Cheers
Jonas