Category Archives: ArcGIS Online

ArcGIS Explorer’s basemap gallery includes ready-to-use basemaps from ESRI and Bing, but you can also add your own. Here’s an overview of how to create and add your own custom basemaps to the basemap gallery.

There are two approaches we can consider when creating our own basemaps. One is that we’ll use one of the existing basemaps and add our own specific layers on top. The other approach is to build a completely new basemap from scratch. Let’s start with adding to an existing existing basemap, and for this example we’ll use one of the ArcGIS map services published by Jithen Singh from Eagle Technology Group, ESRI’s New Zealand distributor (and also serving the Cook Islands and Tokelau).

We’ll start with the default basemap and add a connection to the New Zealand map service that we want to use to create our own custom basemap. Using Add Content, then GIS Services, we connected to Jithen’s New Zealand map service. Here’s what our Table of Contents looks like now:

The World Imagery basemap is seen in other parts of the world, but in New Zealand the New Zealand basemap is what we see on top. Here we’ve zoomed in and used the Swipe tool to show how the New Zealand service is draped on top of the default World Imagery basemap. When we create the basemap, these two services (World Imagery and New Zealand) will be merged into a single basemap.

To save this as a new basemap, just click the ArcGIS Explorer button and choose Save As New Basemap.

We’re prompted to specify basemap options in the dialog show below. We’ve chosen the obvious ”New Zealand” as the name for our basemap. A thumbnail will be automatically captured from the current map extent, but you can create a new one and change it now or at any time later. The thumbnail is a 200px by 133px .png file.

Once we click Save the new basemap is created, and we see our new basemap under My Basemaps in the gallery.

Close the current map and open a new one, and now this new basemap can be used just like any other. Here we’re in 3D mode and have zoomed out, and you can clearly see the New Zealand map (light blue rectangle) displayed atop the World Imagery.

And in our Contents we’ll see the new combined service basemap.

In this approach we’ve leveraged the existing World Imagery basemap, including the elevation services that are part of that basemap, to create our custom New Zealand basemap by adding the New Zealand map service on top of it.

If we want to focus our basemap for use in New Zealand only, we can omit the World Imagery services (reducing our drawing overhead and optimizing performance) but we’ll still want the elevation services, or may want to add our own. So in this next iteration let’s change a few steps and author the basemap with only the New Zealand map plus elevation.

As before, we’ll open a new ArcGIS Explorer session but this time we’ll clear the basemap. Clear Basemap is found at the bottom of the Basemap Gallery.

After we clear the basemap we’ll be looking at a blank white map if we’re in 2D mode, or an empty wire mesh globe if we’re in 3D mode.

We’ll begin creating our new basemap by adding the elevation services. There are two places to find the needed elevation services. The easiest place to find them is in the ArcGIS Explorer group on ArcGIS Online. We’ve added the World Elevation Base as a layer that you can open directly in ArcGIS Explorer.

The other way to add these is to connect directly to the ArcGIS Online server (services.arcgis.online.com/arcgis/services) and look for the elevation services in the Elevation folder. You’ll want to use both services you find there.

Now we add our New Zealand map service as above. This is what our Contents looks like at this point:

Now we can save as a new basemap just like before. Looking at our basemap in 3D we see just the New Zealand map.

Note that when creating basemaps there may be other considerations. If you’re only authoring for 2D, you don’t need the elevation (but the world will be flat in 3D). You may also want to use your own elevation services if you have them available. We’ll cover these topics in more detail in future posts. For more information see the Create a Basemap Help topic.