Rugby Analysis in 3D

After 3 months of distractions and traveling I had to actually force myself to sit down and write this post. That is why the post (mostly about sport statistics) comes a couple of days before the end of the tournament that is the focus point of the post. My apologies. In any case...I finally had a chance to sit down and play around with CityEngine again. Being a big sports fan (rugby in particular) I thought it would be a cool to find a way to use CityEngine to display sport stats in a new way.

The Rugby Championship is rugby championship with four participating countries: South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina. Each team play two matches against all opponents home and away, resulting in 12 championship fixtures.

I decided to create a CityEngine web scene for each fixture. The web scenes shows an aerial image export (from ArcGIS.com basemap), a 3D model of the stadium (from Trimble’s 3D warehouse) and a polygon drawn manually in CityEngine which will be used to visually display the stats of the game by assigning a CGA rule.

The Rule

Step 1:

Creating attributes

The first step of the rule was to create attributes for the Home Team, Away Team and the Stats to Display (1^st half, 2^nd half, and Full Time). These attributes are used in later parts of the rule to add the team logo, as well as for the stats.

Step 2:

More attributes

The next set of attributes represents the actual statistics of the match. The stats were obtained from Rugby Stats - www.rugbystats.com.au

The attributes below represents percentage time in opponent’s half, percentage time in Own half and percentage possession for the First Half, Second Half and Full Time.

More attributes...

Step 3:
Display stats

The CGA rule starts by reading the Home team, Away team and which statistic type to display from the attributes. Next the rule splits the polygon horizontally into 2 parts according to the territorial attributes, as seen in the image below as the Split rule.

The Split rule (to show territory)

More territorial advantage = Greater area of the polygon

Each block is then extruded according to the percentage possession of the ball. 

Higher % possession = Higher block 

Finally, add a 3D model of each stadium as obtained from Trimble's 3D warehouse and its done! This is a simple example of how CityEngine can be very versatile. It is a quick rule, set up once, which I then used multiple times (10 so far). And it is really not difficult.

Have a look at the links below to view the web scenes:

Australia vs New Zealand - 16 August
South Africa vs Argentina - 16 August
New Zealand vs Australia - 23 August
Argentina vs South Africa - 23 August
New Zealand vs Argentina - 06 September
Australia vs South Africa - 06 September
New Zealand vs South Africa - 13 September
Australia vs Argentina - 13 September
South Africa vs Australia - 27 September *
Argentina vs New Zealand - 27 September


Congratulations to the All Blacks that clinched the title last weekend. As well as to the Springboks for taking sweet revenge on the Aussies. I will upload the final 2 web scenes after this coming weekend's games.

*This scene does not have a 3D Model of the stadium    (because I couldn't find one of Newlands in Cape Town)