topic Re: City Engine Flyover in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

City Engine Flyover

LukeCzar — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:27:29 GMT

Hi Matthias,

I have a question, so there is a PLAY button in WEB SCENE to see the video of flying over the buildings , it there anything like that in CITY ENGINE? without having exporting the whole project into Web Scene? I would like to record a short video presenting our Campus, but the file is to big for web scene?

Re: City Engine Flyover

Anonymous User — Tue, 28 May 2013 18:21:47 GMT

Lukaszczar,

To emulate this flyover effect in CityEngine, use the keyboard shortcuts for the bookmarked camera positions. The star-shaped icon on the viewport window has the bookmark controls. In there you can see that the number-pad keys are used as shortcuts to the camera bookmarks. You can sequentially hit each of these keys to move through the bookmarks, which is essentially what the "play" function in the web scene is doing. If it flies too fast or too slow, then under Edit>Preferences>General>Viewport, there is an Animation Time, that you can adjust (500ms = 0.5 seconds). To capture the flythrough, try Camtasia or another screen capture software, and make sure to use powerful machine to make video capture best possible.

Does this help?

Chris

Re: City Engine Flyover

LukeCzar — Wed, 29 May 2013 11:46:47 GMT

Great!!!! just what I needed,

Thank you Chris

Re: City Engine Flyover

LukeCzar — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:31:48 GMT

Chris,

One more thing, so I created many bookmarks but I need more shortcuts - the one I have already are from Num 0-9 , can I assign new buttons to the rest of my bookmarks?

Lukasz

Re: City Engine Flyover

Anonymous User — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:40:54 GMT

There are only 10 bookmarks (0 to 9) exposed as commands through the keyboard preferences dialog, so I'm doubting it is possible to attach keys to those past #9.

Chris

Re: City Engine Flyover

LukeCzar — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:51:21 GMT

Ok thanks, I guess I will record flyover then I will pause the video, delete first 10 bookmarks, and then I will continue

Thanks Chris

Re: City Engine Flyover

Anonymous User — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:53:51 GMT

If the video is your final production step, then you could duplicate the scene file (.cej) and then assign the extra bookmarks in that scene. You would want to do this last, because you are forking your scene at this point, and will probably want to discard the duplicate scenes when done, if you wish to further modify the original scene after making the videos.

Chris

Re: City Engine Flyover

MatthiasBuehler1 — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:12:55 GMT

Maybe you could also play with Python scripting to create the series of bookmarks.

Matt

Re: City Engine Flyover

Renato_Cesar_Ferreira_deSouza — Sat, 28 May 2016 00:22:09 GMT

It remindes me TK8000 doing animation on wireframe. So weak recurse that worthwhile not being difused. Shame. When I just wonder about documentation, this sort of solution appears. Considering the price of the software should be better doing something better or reducing - the price.

Re: City Engine Flyover

ThomasFuchs — Mon, 30 May 2016 15:09:52 GMT

Hello Renato,

Thank you for your reply.

This threat provides a way of doing a simple flyover animation with CityEngine.

But CityEngine is not intended to be a standalone solution for animation.

I am sorry, if you got the impression this would be the case.

Instead, the development team is working closely with key customers in the VFX industry to meet their production needs.

Today CityEngine provides a wide range of 3D model export formats, and there are continuous efforts to support the latest standards. This includes support for animation software workflows like:

Autodesk 3DS MAX and Maya: Autodesk FBX Export
Pixar Renderman: Renderman RIB Export
... and others

Re: City Engine Flyover

LR — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 06:22:12 GMT

You can use "restoreBookmark" with Python, no need to delete bookmarks or limit the number. It's not exactly hard to code either.

from scripting import *
ce = CE()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    vp = ce.getObjectsFrom(ce.get3DViews(), ce.isViewport)[0] #get viewport
    vp.restoreBookmark("b1", True) #navigate to bookmark titled "b1"
    ce.waitForUIIdle() #wait for animation to finish
    vp.restoreBookmark("b99", True) #navigate to bookmark titled "b99"

Re: City Engine Flyover

CherylLau — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 11:36:23 GMT

There is another option to use a 3D mouse to navigate smoothly in the CityEngine viewport and take a screen capture video. But, really, Thomas's suggestion to export your scene and do the animation in another software is the recommended workflow.

Re: City Engine Flyover

Kirsi-MariaViljanen — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 06:01:36 GMT

Hello,

I try to adjust Animation Time 500ms to 50ms. The Viewport don`t save my settings. When I open the Viewport again, there is again 500ms. I want to slow down my web scene flying so this is important. Can someone help me?

Kirsi

Re: City Engine Flyover

Kirsi-MariaViljanen — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 09:28:25 GMT

My CityEngine version is 2018.0. I can change the animation timefrom Edit>Preferences>General>Viewport, there is an Animation Time but if you look animation time from sceneview (pull star and edit bookmarks) time is again 500ms. If you export your data to webscene the flying is still fast.

Re: City Engine Flyover

CherylLau — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:09:07 GMT

This is a bug that the setting is not saved when you do it through the Edit Bookmarks window. Instead, please go to Edit -> Preferences -> General -> Viewport, and this should work.