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I'll focus first on my experience with CityEngine and the technical aspects of the project and then the latter half will be a self-reflection on how the project went artistically and how I feel I could improve. This is my second postmortem on this blog. The Unreal Engine Sequencer Weekend Challenge Postmortem was entirely technical in nature, but I'm enjoying these projects and I think I should work on growing artistically too. If anyone has any feedback or suggestions to help me improve, I would also really appreciate it.
For those not familiar with CityEngine, it's a standalone app used by the VFX and GIS industries to procedurally generate real-world and fictional cities. It's been used to create cities like those found in Zootopia and Netflix's The Witcher.
I want to make it clear that I set out to just use a default-generated CityEngine city with stock textures and very little cleanup and see how far I could push it. I don't have too much experience with CityEngine yet. My process with CityEngine this time around was unashamedly along the lines of clicking a "Make City" button and exporting it to Blender. I wanted to set out and answer the question, "How can this tool serve me artistically without investing a lot of time learning it?" You can do a lot more by writing custom scripts, providing your own component assets, and art directing the results within CityEngine. There's no doubt to me that CityEngine provides tremendous value and it's a tool that I would want to invest more time in.
CityEngine provides a ton of file formats to choose from (FBX, Alembic, USD, etc.), but I chose glTF because that gave me starting Principaled BSDF materials for the buildings in Blender. I just ran into one bug that sets the blend mode for the materials to "Alpha Blend" which results in some weird transparency blending issues in the viewport in "Material Preview" viewport mode and Eevee. I mostly worked with "Solid" and "Rendered" viewport modes and was fine ignoring it.
This is my first time in many years that I've challenged myself artistically and the first time since college that I've attempted a photoreal CGI project. I've always been more technical than artistic. There's still a lot of room for growth and I want to continue growing artistically so I hope I have a chance to do more projects like this one.
There are a lot of basic steps I could have added, but I just ran out of time. I'll need to spend more time than just a weekend on my next project to improve.
Overall, it was a great experience and I would like to invest more time in learning CityEngine to produce more detailed and art directed results. I'd be interested in trying a more iterative workflow between CityEngine and Blender to see if I can still make modeling and layout changes in CityEngine while preserving surfacing work that I might have already started in Blender.
© 2021 Matias Codesal