Procedural and ESRI have teamed up with NVIDIA to set up a pipeline for the creation, analysis and visualization of photorealistic 3D cities from 2D ArcGIS data. The video shows the creation of the 3D model of the City of Rotterdam in CityEngine:
3D in ArcGIS has always been a bit of a love/hate affair with us so the ability to create a workflow that includes the CityEngine is an intriguing development.
3D Rotterdam in the cloud: http://www.procedural.com/showcases/rotterdam.htmlNVIDIA
RealityServer: http://www.mentalimages.com/products/realityserver.html
ArcGIS 3D Analyst: http://www.esri.com/3d