topic Re: Text or Labels in City Engine in ArcGIS CityEngine Questions

Text or Labels in City Engine

JimJohnson2 — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:12:05 GMT

Is there any way to use text or labels to identify the streets, buildings, etc...? Can someone point me to a tutorial or help menu for this.

Thanks

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MatthiasBuehler1 — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:49:17 GMT

Hi,

I'm not perfectly sure what you mean..

You want to find and select objects which match ?

Let me know a bit more details..

m.

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MatthiasBuehler1 — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 11:10:13 GMT

hi ..
in what 3d environment ?

in CityEngine ?

lemme know ..

m.

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

AndreasUlmer — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 10:53:50 GMT

Currently only geometry objects (3D models) can be displayed in CityEngine Web Scenes, so no labels or symbols.
The only option now would be to prepare textures with the street labels, assign them to the features with cga and object attributes, and export as geometry objects along with the real geometry. This however will be displayed as every other geometry (e.g. will not have a constant screen size). By putting the "label geometries" on a separate layer you could mimick a labels on/off behaviour. So this is clearly a makeshift solution.

You might be able to automatize the label-texture-generation process using an image library (e.g. imagemagick) together with the CityEngine Python api. e.g.

a possible workflow:
1. run a CE py script to collect street name attributes from or features, and prepare an imagemagick bat script
2. running the bat script generates per-feature label textures
3. adapt the cga script so that each feature references its label texture.

Let me know if this scenario is of interest, I think I can find some scripts along these lines in the attic.

FYI: We are working on a follow-up application to the CE Web Scene viewer that will support point/line/polygon geometries along with symbolisation and labels. So improvements are on the way.

best
Andreas

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

StevenBoyington — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 16:54:52 GMT

I am looking for a way or a work around to label objects in the scene's viewport (manually or otherwise) as well. It's been a couple months since the last post on this thread. Has anyone had success doing so?

Best,

Matt Lukens

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MatthiasBuehler1 — Fri, 17 Jan 2014 10:13:03 GMT

Hi,

There's still no 'labels' in CityEngine and there won't be for the near future.

What you can do is use CGA to create a rule that creates some labels as 3d models. But of course it depends a bit on what you need on those labels .. Do you have some more info ?

Let me know ..

matt

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

StevenBoyington — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 14:40:01 GMT

At the moment I would want to make basic mapping labels such for Street Names, labeling buildings, etc. So a viewer would know what they are looking at.

I understand, in concept, what you are saying about writing a CGA, to generate 3d Labels, however I am a novice at CityEngine and code writing.

Matt L

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MatthiasBuehler1 — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 13:16:58 GMT

Well, there's currently no around this .. 😞

Sorry.

And I'm currently really busy, so I have no spare time to help out with this ..

Maybe play a bit in CGA and let me know how you progress.. ok ?

Matt

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MichaelWalton — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 16:34:10 GMT

Hi,

I am willing to do the workflow that you described above, please provide me with an example script for .cga textured labeling for features like streets.

I was asked to label just the prominent downtown streets in my 3D model I made for my company, so there maybe a query involved for only certain streets.

I feel that importing 3D model labels from sketchup will add too much file size to the .3ws

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

Anonymous User — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:23:17 GMT

Steven,

Here is a rule I made to do 3D text, with font roughly matching Ariel:

CGA Rule: 3D_Text

Have fun!

Chris

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

NathanStocker — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 23:28:01 GMT

Thanks Chris, that rule is wonderfully useful! I managed to add options for vertical and horizontal alignment and it's working great.

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MichaelWalton — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 13:46:06 GMT

Hi, I tested out the rule for 3D text. Want to know if I used it correctly and I have one question.

What I did was draw a polygon over a street and applied the 3D text rule, edited some parameters, and lowered the polygon slightly below the street surface.

My question is, when I export an entire scene should I merge all the 3D text layers as one and export them as the backdrop state? This way the layer doesn't appear in the Web scene table of contents.

Thanks again Chris,

Michael

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

Anonymous User — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 14:51:06 GMT

I'm not sure. That doesn't sound like something that would work. Could you try it and share your experiences with us?

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MichaelWalton — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 19:29:39 GMT

I was about to try it on a project, but I discovered the 3D text rule didn't generate. The same 3D text rule works on my laptop which has CE 2014.0, but on my pc, I have CE 2014.1 and 3D text doesn't generate. There is an error that appears in the problems log "Error: geometry asset not found in ResolveMap"

And the warning looks like this in the log: [Method: 'Default$sx'] assetInfo(): assetInfo(): could not load file 'rules/3D_Text/For_3D_Text/Arial/3.obj' - returning 0.

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

Anonymous User — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 19:47:23 GMT

I think something might have changed in between the two 2014 versions. I remember having a problem with this recently. I don't think CGA likes how I stored my assets in the rules folder. I'm not sure why I did that originally.

Try moving the "For_3D_Text" folder to your assets folder, and changing the "assetsDirectory" constant (1st line of code I think) to this:

const assetsDirectory = "assets/For_3D_Text/" + Font + "/"

Let me know if it works, and I'll update the download on my blog post.

Thanks!

Chris

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MichaelWalton — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 19:53:45 GMT

Now it works...thank you for the quick fix

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

Anonymous User — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:04:37 GMT

Awesome. I'll update the original asap!

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

MichaelWalton — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 20:32:42 GMT

Hey another awesome thing....if you export a scene with a 3D labels layer set as "backdrop", it will appear in the webscene and will not be present in layer table of contents.

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

AlanKlys — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 06:35:03 GMT

Thanks a bunch for this rule Chris ! Very handy indeed.

I have a hypothetical question ... would it be possible dynamically generate the text based on some attribute values / text etc ? As in link this to say building height and have it change as the height changes ?

I had a peek at the code but alas it's a little beyond me at this stage.

PS: I appreciate the note about the weird push / pop notation ... made me have a look and try to figure it out seems rather handy.

Re: Text or Labels in City Engine

Anonymous User — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 16:47:58 GMT

The original file on my blog is updated for the path change.

Regarding building heights in your question: Yes that is possible. Import the 3D text rule into your building rule, and use below notation to set the attributes from your importing rule, then call its start rule which is Generate.

import Text:"rules/3D_Text/3D_Text.cga"

set(Text.Font_Height, yourValueFromTheImportingRuleGoesHere)

Text.Generate