topic Re: Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine

TimHayes — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:54:34 GMT

Has anyone been using CityEngine to map the piping systems, Valves, Tunnels, and buildings/structures inside of a Wastewater Treatment Plant? Is there an article or resources someone could refer me to showing ways CityEngine could be used for this purpose?

It seems from what I am reading on this site that CityEngine is most appropriate for City's and Campuses (Buildings, Roads, and Landscapes).

Re: Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine

PhilCooper — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:36:24 GMT

Just to add to this question is it feasible to ingest terrestrial lidar data of a site with accurate height information and detail? Any pointers would be helpful.

Re: Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine

MatthiasBuehler1 — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 13:55:12 GMT

hi !

sadly, to all of this : no.

CityEngine has no specific piping functionality, but we have heard this request quite a few times now so we're seriously considering this to be implemented.

LIDAR is not supported in CityEngine since CityEngine is not designed to interpret / analyze LIDAR data. For this specifically, use dedicated solutions or track down companies who do this as a service.

Re: Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine

CaryGreenwood — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:05:41 GMT

Has there been an update on this piping functionality in CityEngine 2012.1 as of today?

Thanks for any details!

- Cary

Re: Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine

MatthiasBuehler1 — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:40:16 GMT

Hi !

Sadly, the piping feature has not yet been implemented.

You still would have to use the 'hack solution' by misusing the 'Dynamic City Layouts System'. That way, fast visualizations can be made, but it will not satisfy an engineer..

😞

Re: Industrial Plants, Piping, and City Engine

TimHayes — Sat, 09 Aug 2014 18:07:08 GMT

Thanks for the responses. They are helpful. We already 3D laser scanned (point clouds) piping inside our tunnels, georeferenced this data to the coordinate system we use in our GIS. Leica Truview software (the free viewer) we can view our 3D piping data in all its wonderful glory, amazing stuff. We then click on the particular pipe to get its xyz coordinates, export these coordinates into an xml file. Then we open this xml file in Excel, save it as a spreadsheet, then import this spreadsheet into our ArcGIS Geodatabase. We then create a point feature class with the xy coordinates. From the points we then create a polyline in our Pipes Feature Class and attribute the pipe accordingly.

This has many advantages for us:

1) We spend less time manually mapping pipes while physically inside our tunnels lugging around a pen and paper clipboard or heavy tablet craning and turning our necks 360 degrees. Now this is done directly from the comfort our desktops.

2) We have XYZ attributes for our tunnel piping.

3) Even though we are using this data in ArcGIS as 2D, not 3D, we are 3D "ready" in the event ESRI develops a 3D Piping solution, and we know the height and length of the pipes in our tunnels useful for construction purposes.