3D GIS Community
Virtual 3D cities and geodesign in 3D are hot topics these days, and at the recent Esri Partner Conference and Developer Summit lead product engineer Mark Bockenhauer demonstrated some interesting capabilities which can potentially make your entire virtual city, including the software used to view and analyze it, completely portable – even pocketable.
We’ve heard lots of feedback over the last few days from users who want to find the old “Insert your favorite” blog. Unfortunately the redirects we had in place when we deployed the new ArcGIS Blog pointed to its home page instead of these specific locations, leading to many unhappy readers. We have most of these redirects in place now & will have the rest completed today. If you’d rather not wait, here’s a table matching the old individual blogs to their corresponding URLs and RSS feeds in the new unified blog.
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By Aileen Buckley, Mapping Center Lead
ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 4 (SP4) for English, is now available to our users for download via the ArcGIS Resource Center. This Service Pack contains performance improvements and maintenance fixes. Here are links to the downloads:
Release Note: ArcGIS 10.0 Service Pack 4 for the other five languages (French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish) will be released in the next two weeks. A follow up blog entry will be posted to announce the availability once they are ready.
For the past few years the various ArcGIS product development teams have hosted a few dozen separate blogs covering the width of the ArcGIS system. Now we have pulled those together into a single ArcGIS Blog so that you can more easily browse, subscribe to, learn from, and stay up-to-speed on the latest information from all our engineers and developers. In addition, the single blog reflects ArcGIS as a system and allows us to better tell big picture implementation stories that we couldn’t in the fragmented system.
If you do want to narrow your focus, just click a Category (under Technical Communities and Industry Communities) or Tag to see the posts for that particular area. You should find a category or tag that matches up with the subject area for each of the old separate blogs. A few may have been overlooked or thought to be unnecessary. We appreciate your feedback on specific categories or tags that should be added to help focus in on subject matter that is of interest to you.
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Have a question? Want to talk GIS? Looking for some good ideas? Jump into the conversation!
A few weeks back we rolled out some new features that we hope will improve the forums’ usefulness. One of the new features is the ability for those who post questions in the forums to rate the replies. In addition, any logged in user can also join in and vote on the various replies and conversations in order to help us identify the best information, helping you find good information more quickly. Another huge benefit to the new voting tools is that it helps us all identify, recognize, and reward those forums users who contribute the most helpful information.
Until June 2010, our old discussion forums (now archived) supported what we called the “Forums MVP Program”. Once every 6 months we would identify the Top 10 members of the community and make them eligible for MVP recognition and some valuable prizes.
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Esri CityEngine 2011.2 is available now for download from the Customer Care Portal. This version replaces CityEngine 2011.1 and is strongly recommended as it contains a number of improvements.
In addition to several bug fixes, the highlights of new features in version 2011.2 are:
- Improved FileGDB import and export
- Python (Jython) is update to version 2.5.2
- Support of multi-touch gestures for viewport navigation
- Added Visual C Runtime installer to CityEngine setup
More information is available at http://resources.arcgis.com/content/cityengine/about.
Gert van Maren
3D Product Manager
Some really good improvements are coming soon to the Resource Center. Checkout this sneak peak of the updates that will be released in conjunction with ArcGIS 10.1.
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Recently, we made changes to some of the Globe services that are referenced by the 3D Virtual City template. These changes improve perfomance and in order to take advantage, you need the latest VirtualCity.3dd Globe document which points to these new services.
To get the new VirtualCity.3dd, please download the template again here.
Thanks
Gert
Have a question? Want to talk GIS? Looking for some good ideas? Jump into the conversation!
A few weeks back we rolled out some features that we hope will improve the forums’ usefulness. To be candid, we’re sure many would say that some of these features should have been there since day one, or at least long overdue, but we listened to what you wanted and found a way to get them in there for you to use.
Let’s start with the big one…
Community Voting
If you read something and you like it, give it a thumbs up!
Now any forum user can let the community know where the good information is. How you do it is simple. If you read a post or a reply and you think it contains some really good information, click the “up” arrow on the right. This is similar to the “Like” button in Facebook.
If we all do this, then the best posts will bubble to the top. If you want to read the entire thread you can, but if you need to most quickly find the good stuff, look at the posts that have a high score.
There is also a “down” arrow, but you can only use that to “Unlike” something you previously Liked.
If you find “The Answer”, give it a check!
If you started a thread with a question, then whichever reply you think is the best, give it a check. That will mark your thread as “answered” for all to see, and it will give some MVP points to the person who wrote it.
Two birds with one stone
Clicking the checks and arrows has two benefits:
1. You are helping everyone find the best information.
2. You are helping everyone recognize the best contributors.
One of the great things about any community is the trust earned by those folks who share their experience and help others. Some pros out there are always going to stick out, but these new voting tools are going to help find others who are just as helpful and useful who you might not yet know.
Discussions versus Q&A
When you start a new thread, you can let everyone know if you’re starting a discussion or if you’re asking a specific question. Discussions show up in the thread list with a yellow “D” icon and questions with a red “Q”.
When the original poster or a moderator identifies one of the replies as the best answer, the “Q” icon turns into a green “A”.
This helps you find answers more quickly, and if you want to jump in and let everyone know what you think, this helps you more quickly find questions that haven’t been answered yet.
Private Messages
Most of the time an open public discussion is a great way to get the best information, but sometimes you may want to take it off-line.
Up on the menu is a “Private Messages” link. Click that to see your Inbox or to send direct messages to other users. Also, clicking their name anywhere in the forums provides a pop-up you can use to send a message to them if they’ve activated it.
You can use the “Forum Actions > User Control Panel” menu to control who can send you messages. You can turn it completely on, completely off, or limited to just those users in your Contacts list.
New Badges
Badges are a great way to find those folks who have been around the block a time or two. Anyone with more than 200 posts in the forums becomes a “Senior Member”, and of course anyone on the forums who works for Esri is badged as “esri” with a globe logo.
And when you see 
someone with a “Forums MVP” badge, you know you’re talking with someone the community has said has the best information and is most dedicated to your success. These are folks who have been voted by the community to be in the Top 10 of all contributors during any previous six-month MVP rating period. And once you’re an MVP, you’re always an MVP.
And more importantly, now that the new community voting tools have been included, it’s time to roll out the new MVP program. Watch this blog post next week for a description of the new rules, new standards, and a list of awards you can earn through all of your good effort. So jump in and help us figure out who the players are; maybe it’s you!
What’s Next?
The Advanced Search page gives you a lot of flexibility to build a complex search. What we’re working on next is giving you the ability to save that search definition. This will be good for bookmarking and sharing. We’ve also heard that most users participate in some forums a lot, some forums a little and others not at all. We are going to improve your “What’s New” page so that it only includes those forums you want to browse. If there are any other improvements you’d like to see, reply here, or jump into the conversation on the Resource Center Site Feedback forum.
Content for this post provided by Jim Barry
When it comes to 3D model stock, Google’s 3D Warehouse is a great resource. However as we all know, these models can’t be used in other GIS packages (3D Warehouse EULA, paragraph 11.4).
As GIS professionals, we have to rely on other sources of 3D content. With the recent addition of CityEngine to the Esri 3D lineup, it has become very easy to generate 3D geotypcial urban content. The software has a powerful procedural modeling core that allows you to dynamically create 3D buildings and streets using your existing operational geodatabases, further reducing the need to maintain a separate 3D model database.
However at this stage, our procedural modeling core does not allow you to model 3D trees, cars, street furniture etc. Also for geospecific 3D buildings, it is sometimes easier to model these manually rather than procedurally.
We therefore reached out to the team of professional modelers at FormFonts 3D. FormFonts started doing in-house modeling of georeferenced 3D models for Esri this year, and so we’d like to share this excellent source of 3D model stock with the Esri community.
FormFonts 3D is a subscription 3D modeling service with more than 11,000 subscribers. It has a professionally developed 3D model library with more than 50,000 3D assets under management. You can subscribe to this living library of rights managed and professional model stock for $199 a year (per user), and enjoy the highest quality 3D models on demand – anytime and anywhere you need them. This subscription model can work well for most of our users, and FormFonts will discount subscriptions depending on the size of your ELA.
FormFonts 3D’s models and textures are fully compatible with ArcGIS via the Collada .dae format and if you have specific modeling needs, FormFonts will undertake these on a bespoke basis, and can usually turn your models around in less than 48 hours.
Click here to download a complimentary tester pack of 3D models to try from FromFonts 3D. Instructions are included with the download to add them into ArcGIS.
Gert van Maren
3D Product manager
