Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award · 2026Houseal Lavigne · Town of Wake Forest, NC

Wake Forest Digital Twin

Walk through downtown Wake Forest before the new buildings exist.

An immersive Unreal Engine digital twin of downtown Wake Forest, North Carolina, built from the Town’s GIS data. With Esri’s Vitruvio plugin, building footprints can be edited live while it runs, so residents could see proposed heights and redevelopment from the street and tell planners what they thought.

Read Esri’s case study The Downtown Plan (PDF)

Street-level render from the digital twin: a downtown Wake Forest sidewalk with café seating, street banners, trees and parked cars

Street level in the digital twin. Images: Town of Wake Forest Downtown Plan (2024).

2026

Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award, to the Town and Houseal Lavigne

3–10

storey building heights residents could compare

downtown subareas with clear development expectations

2024

Downtown Plan adopted, with the twin as one of its four parts

Award

Esri Special Achievement in GIS Award, 2026

Esri recognized the Town of Wake Forest and Houseal Lavigne Associates in the Community Planning and Economic Development category. The award honours the project as a whole: the planning, analysis, community engagement and the digital twin together.

I was one member of a larger team. My part was the immersive digital twin; the planning work and the award belong to everyone who built this project.

See Esri’s list of winners

The challenge

Height and density are hard to picture on a map

After finishing a community-wide plan, Wake Forest’s planners kept hearing the same questions about downtown: how tall could new buildings get, how dense would it feel, and would it still look like Wake Forest? Downtown’s terrain makes this harder, with grade changes of 20 to 25 feet within a few blocks.

As part of the 2024 Downtown Plan, the project team built an immersive digital twin of the study area, from Roosevelt Avenue to Taylor Street and from Elm Avenue to the railroad. It deliberately left out façade materials and architectural style, so conversations stayed on what the plan could actually decide: height, setbacks, transitions, views and scale.

Inside the twin

Existing downtown, then the proposals, side by side

Proposed buildings appear as simple yellow massing, so residents judged height and scale rather than architecture.

Aerial view of downtown Wake Forest in the digital twin, with proposed redevelopment shown as yellow building massing among existing brick buildings — From above
An aerial view with proposed redevelopment shown as massing around the historic core.

Street view in the digital twin with a proposed multi-storey building in yellow massing behind the existing streetscape — At street level
The same proposals from the sidewalk, at the height a resident would actually see them.

Community Open House

Residents took the controller

At the Community Open House, people explored the twin themselves in a third-person view, with an Xbox controller on ordinary screens.

Walk or fly through downtown from pedestrian and aerial viewpoints
Switch between existing conditions and future scenarios
Toggle redevelopment options and compare building heights of three, five, eight and ten storeys
Give feedback directly to the project team while standing in the scene

Residents gathered around a large screen showing the digital twin at the Community Open House

The digital twin running on a laptop in third-person view, with a game controller beside it

Live procedural buildings

Edit a footprint, and the building rebuilds itself

The twin uses Vitruvio, Esri’s CityEngine plugin for Unreal Engine. It runs CityEngine’s procedural CGA rules inside Unreal, so buildings are generated from their footprints and attributes while the twin is running, not baked in ahead of time.

Building footprints can be edited live during runtime, and the model regenerates on the spot
The CityEngine rule packages from the planning model drive the buildings in Unreal, instead of exporting them as static meshes
Heights and massing change through rule parameters rather than new 3D models, which suits quick side-by-side scenarios

The pipeline

01CityEngineCGA rules describe how a footprint becomes a building
02Rule packageThe rules are exported as an RPK
03VitruvioUnreal runs the RPK and generates buildings at runtime
04Live editChange a footprint or height, and the building updates

Vitruvio on GitHub

How it was built

From the Town’s GIS data to an interactive downtown

01
Analyze
ArcGIS Pro analysis of land use, streets, slopes, block sizes, ownership and reuse opportunities.
02
Model
The Town’s GIS data built into a detailed 3D model of downtown’s terrain and buildings with ArcGIS CityEngine.
03
Immerse
The model brought into Epic’s Unreal Engine, with Vitruvio generating the buildings live from CityEngine rules.
04
Engage
Residents explored it at the Community Open House and gave feedback on heights and redevelopment.

Outcomes

What the twin fed into

According to Esri, insights from the digital twin directly informed the Town’s decisions.

Zoning and the UDO

Updates to the zoning code and the Unified Development Ordinance.

Seven subareas

Clear development expectations across downtown’s seven functional subareas.

Height and massing

Guidelines that respect the scale and character of the historic district.

Connections

Priority pedestrian and vehicular connections identified across downtown.

The Downtown Plan itself, adopted in 2024, also received a 2025 APA-NC Marvin Collins Award for Small Area Plan.

Coverage

See the whole plan

The Downtown Plan covers land use, parking, market analysis and the digital twin. Esri’s case study tells the story of how the twin was used.