CityEngine was originally designed and developed by Pascal Mueller from Switzerland. He invented a breakthrough programmatic modeling technology during his doctoral study in the computer vision laboratory at ETH Zurich. This technology was mainly used for three-dimensional architectural design, which also laid a solid foundation for CityEngine. In 2001, he published a research article "Procedural Modeling of Cities" in SIGGRAPH. This also meant CityEngine had been officially out of the lab.

In my opinion, all the unique and particularly beautiful sceneries can be created only by the nature, which is forever beyond any human's power. At the same time, any beauty intervened by human has got permanent limitations. Therefore, for a long time, I guess in the mind of many people, there is a beautiful world that only belongs to ourselves. If you want to make it perfectly presented on a computer, Terragen is one of the best solutions you need.