What’s New in CityEngine 2025.0: Exploring the Latest Update

CityEngine 2025.0 is now officially out as part of the ArcGIS bro Pro and Pro Plus rental subscription.

Yes. Now, it’s fully moved to a subscription model, so no more perpetual licenses for sale.

That said, if you’ve been using annual subscriptions for the standalone CityEngine, you’ll need to switch to the new subscription types.

Curious? Sure, we thought so.

What is CityEngine?

Well, maybe we kinda rushed it: for those who aren’t in the know, maybe we should’ve told what this thing’s all about before jumping in.

CityEngine is a powerful 3D tool that lets you quickly build huge, interactive, and realistic urban environments. And unlike old-school methods, it speeds up the design process like crazy. You can also integrate CityEngine’s procedural generation magic into your favorite planning software – thanks to its flexible compatibility with other platforms.

Be that as it may, CityEngine’s always been a go-to for architects and urban planners working with ArcGIS. However, it’s also big in films and game dev thanks to its:

• FBX, Alembic, USD support.
  
• Houdini, Maya, and Unreal Engine 5 integration.
  
• Visual CGA Editor upgrades.
  
• Fast node searching.
  
• Quite nice rendering. Here, both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering now on by default.
  
• Improved shadow visuals.
  
• Smooth Boolean ops.
  

So, What’s New?

The big highlight of 2025.0 is Street Designer, – a tool that lets you build complex, highly detailed streets. With it, you can:

• Add, edit, and delete traffic lanes right (in the viewport).
  
• Use different lane types. Those for cars, parking, pedestrians, greenery, and some of the ‘buffer zones’.
  
• Auto-generate road markings.
  
• Place urban props like benches, streetlights, trees, poles, etc.
  

There are also some pre-made street templates. And you can save your own setups – just to reuse them in other projects.

System Requirements & Pricing

The latest version of the CityEngine 2025.0 runs on:

- Windows 10+/Server 2016 (64-bit); or RHEL 8, AlmaLinux 8, Rocky Linux 8 (newer is better).

Subscription costs are as follows:

- ArcGIS Pro: $2,200/year.
- Pro Plus: $4,200/year.

Some Final Thoughts on the Update

With Street Designer and the revamped Visual CGA Editor, CityEngine 2025.0 is an even stronger tool for urban designers, VFX artists, and game developers – as for now. It’ll definitely help in building hyper-realistic procedural cities for films, architecture, and games.
Just try it out by yourself and you’ll see.