Having some trouble with terrain images. I have a DEM in arcGIS 10.2 that I made in civil 3d. I've exported that layer to a 16bit tiff file uncompressed, but it seems when it is read into CityEngine 2012.1 it seems like it is converted to 8bit, and most of the elevation data is lost. It's either 1, or 0....which makes a crazy terrain. I also notice that the image is inverse. It says in the help file that 16bit images are supported. Am I doing something wrong? I've attached some images so you can see what I am talking about How it looks in arcGIS: [ATTACH=CONFIG]29939[/ATTACH]
How it looks in CityEngine 2012.1: [ATTACH=CONFIG]29940[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=CONFIG]29942[/ATTACH]
I'd say some info was lost when exporting the file from ArcGIS. Maybe test the file by reimporting into ArcGIS and compare to the original coming from Civil3d.
If it's the same, try updating to CityEngine 2013. It will work using the same 2012 license.
Let me know if this makes things better. There were some terrain value reading issues in 2012 that are now hopefully all fixed.
Yes that was me! As well as using infraworks, we do use cityEngine quite bit. I did mention it in my lecture, but I wasn't able to show the HUGE (85,000 ha) master plan that was a combination of cityEngine, Revit, Infraworks, Civil3d and FME due to confidentiality reasons. It should be public soon and I can share the results as well as the workflow, which was intense ;). Dominik, from the Redlands office was in the audience and introduced himself, I think he was happy I mentioned cityEngine 🙂
We should actually talk offline at some point, We are considering starting an R&D effort around incorporating and visualizing big Data at the urban scale to help guide master plan development, even when that data is being generated directly by the design process, cityengine will likely play a big role in this.
Anyway, back on topic: I did check the tif, and it looks fine in archGIS, as well as in FME's data inspector. I think it's losing bit depth when it comes into cityEngine. Maybe another format will work? As far as 2013 is concerned...Sadly we cannot get it to run on our computers here. We have tried on 3, two very high end laptops, and a workstation, and all of them receive the same fatal error on start-up, the program opens, but you can't do anything. We are working with ESRI support to resolve, but for the moment, I am stuck in 2012.1. 😞
