Hi, yes, CityEgnine don’t support LIDAR. If you want to create the most accurate building geometry from LIDAR, you could create multipatches from the LIDAR Surface with ArcGIS. This will create a static geometry, that contains a lot of polygons and therefor it’s not recommended for larger areas, also the building will get very edged.
What I normally do, is that I’m creating a slope raster from the LIDAR, and assign the majority of that slope to each building, with control points on each building footprint, I can get close to which rooftype that will match. Ex. If 3 control points in the center of a building, from gable to gable has the same height , but the facades has a lower height, then you have a gable roof, and so on.
The control points are created in CityEngine, and imported into ArcGIS, for adding the information. As soon as you got the information, then you can use CityEngine to automatically generate low polygon smart models.
It’s not 100 % accurate all the time, but simple roofs will get very close to the real thing. As soon as you have multiply roof geometries inside the same footprint, I see no other way than to split the polygon matching the different geometries, or use the LIDAR to multipatch, If you want the automated process.
Esri Netherland has created an comparison scene, where you can see a couple of procedural workflows VS. Direct from LIDAR, and the hand modelled city model.
http://esrinederland.maps.arcgis.com/apps/CEWebViewer/viewer.html?3dWebScene=303cc1648cb944e8bd36a85...