Esri releases CityEngine 2025.0
Esri has updated CityEngine, its heavyweight procedural 3D city generation software.
Key changes in CityEngine 2025.0 include a dedicated Street Designer for creating complex procedural multi-lane road configurations, and updates to the Visual CGA Editor.
The software is now available rental-only, via Esri’s ArcGIS Professional and Professional Plus subscriptions.
A procedural tool for generating 3D city models for urban planning and VFX
CityEngine generates city models from procedural rules, importing data in file formats like OBJ and DXF, and exporting in formats including FBX, Alembic and USD.
Although aimed at architects and urban planners – it integrates with Esri’s ArcGIS platform – the software is also designed for entertainment, and comes with connections to DCC tools and game engines, including Houdini, Maya and UE5.
New in CityEngine 2025.0: create complex road configurations with Street Designer
The main new feature in CityEngine 2025.0 is Street Designer, a new tool for creating streets.
Each ‘street segment’ consists of a set of customizable lanes, with users able to add, edit or delete lanes directly in the viewport.
There are a range of different lane types, including vehicle, parking, buffer, sidewalk and vegetation lanes, making it possible to create complex configurations.
Traffic lanes come with procedurally generated markings, while other lane types can include procedurally generated trees and street furniture like streetlights, bollards and benches.
The software ships with a range of preset configurations for common street layouts, while custom configurations can be saved and reused between projects.
Workflow and performance updates
The update also streamlines sequential programming, introduced in CityEngine 2024.1 to enable new features like Boolean operations.
The Visual CGA Editor, which makes it possible to assemble models using a node-based visual programming workflow, rather than coding in CityEngine’s CGA language, gets workflow improvements including the option to find nodes by typing in parts of their names.
Viewport rendering quality has also been improved, with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering now enabled by default, and better shadow quality in Viewport window snapshots.
Licensing changes: now available subscription-only
Esri has also changed its licensing model for CityEngine, which is now only available through ArcGIS Professional and Professional Plus subscriptions.
Users with old single-product CityEngine annual subscriptions must transfer them to one of the two subscription types.
Sales of perpetual licenses ended this month, although existing perpetual license holders can still continue to buy maintenance.
Pricing and system requirements
CityEngine 2025.0 is available for 64-bit Windows 10+ and Server 2016+ and RHEL Server 8+ Linux, AlmaLinux 8+ and Rocky Linux 8+.
The software is available rental-only, via ArcGIS Professional subscriptions, which cost $2,200/year, or Professional Plus subscriptions, which cost $4,200/year.
Read an overview of the new features in CityEngine 2025.0 on the product blog
Read a full list of new features in CityEngine in the online changelog
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