CityEngine 2019 missing Plant Library ?

[AlanKlys]

Hi folks,

We've recently installed the latest CE2019 and I'm just in the process of migrating old projects.

I noticed that the Plant Library is totally missing ?

In the 2019 Plant Loader rule the Asset Folder points to this directory which is non existent in my install ? 

/ESRI.lib/assets/Webstyles/Vegetation 

I tried a quick fix by copying the 2018 Plant assets across and changing the above line to the new location, as per the 2018 version, but it still doesn't work and I get the Unknown Asset cube where trees are meant to be.   

/ESRI.lib/assets/Plants      

I don't want to be digging through and changing existing code if this is a bug or some oversight with the installer ? 

Plus where are all the new glTF models that I've seen others refer to ?

[ZorkoSostaric1 · Accepted solution]

Alan,

Just go to File menu and select 'Manage Esri.lib' and then pick a style you want to download.

[AlanKlys]

Ahhhh  ... 

Thanks a bunch Zorko. I feel like a newb asking such a basic question.

Next time I promise to read the online manual first. 

Muchos gracias amigo! 

[Anonymous User]

This does not fix the issue for me. I have the plant library installed, and my hard drive has all the pictures for textures, but the plant loader still results in cubes with the label "unknown asset"

[AlanKlys]

If you have ESRI.lib installed correctly in your workspace, and your projects sitting in there correctly too, then it should work properly.

[CherylLau]

Maybe try updating ESRI.lib too (as well as downloading the Vegetation)?

[DevinLavigne]

If your old projects were referencing specific models (i.e. Alder_Buckthorn_Fan_0.obj) then updating the library isn't going to work. All of the previous vegetation models are gone and replaced with new GTLF models. In my honest opinion, I think the CE team sacrificed visual quality for performance. I don't care much for the new vegetation, and a lot of my rules were using these assets so the update has broken a number of my previous projects - littering my landscape with little white error cubes. I wish they had thought this through. I was able to restore the previous models from a backup and have rewritten the Plant_loader.cga and Plant_Distributor.cga to give me the ability to choose with models to use. 

[CherylLau]

Sorry, we are aware that the new vegetation models have decreased in visual quality in comparison to the old vegetation models.  We are working on this, and we are hoping to improve this in the future.

With regards to the breaking changes, sorry about the inconvenience.  We wanted to separate the vegetation models from the CityEngine installer to prevent the installer from growing tremendously in size.  We also wanted to start incorporating additional 3D assets through Webstyles, which are common across several Esri products.  The GLTF format allows for the possibility of PBR rendering and multiple LODs, which is used in the SceneViewer.  Therefore, we had to change to GLTF models, and reorganize the file structure, and move to a downloadable content format, all of which resulted in breaking changes for CityEngine.  We are sorry about the breaking changes, and we hope that the benefits of shared assets and downloadable content will become worthwhile later.

[DavidWasserman]

To add to this, this page stands as the only easy to find documentation of this feature. Can we get an update to the docs or can you point to one that we can reference?

[Matthew_Miller]

Here is the link to the 2020.0 ESRI.lib documentation.