Tag Archives: ArcScene
ArcGIS – CityEngine Urban Planning videos
For your viewing pleasure: 4 videos to accompany the CityEngine: Philadelphia example we published a couple of weeks ago. The videos show the full ArcGIS – CityEngine round trip:
- prepare your data in ArcGIS for input into CityEngine
- generate a 3D city in CityEngine from standard GIS data
- urban planning using CityEngine: design in 3D
- export your design and bring it back into ArcGIS for further and analysis and sharing
Note: you need to download the latest CityEngine Urban Planning Example for updated rules!
Have a good Xmas break and see you back in 2012!
Gert
Esri R&D Center Zürich
ArcGIS – CityEngine round trippin'
Last week we made the ‘CityEngine: Philadelphia example’ available for download on the CityEngine resource center. The main comments we’ve received so far are:
- how do I get my GIS data into CityEngine, and
- how do I bring it back into ArcGIS?
So let’s do a roundtrip! Continue reading
CityEngine to ArcGIS
CityEngine allows you to model and design your city in 3D based on GIS geometry, attributes and procedural rules.
What do you get when you cross the 3D Analyst extension with the Network Analyst extension?
3D networks, or course! Using 3D networks, you can model transportation networks in x, y, and z space and answer questions like…
• What’s the shortest indoor route or cross-campus route?
• What’s the shortest wheelchair-accessible route?
• Which interior spaces of a building can be reached with a 100-foot fire hose?
• What’s the most efficient way to deliver campus mail?
• Where are the best locations to install a set of defibrillators or a set of printers?
All six network analysis solvers work on 3D network datasets so there are many more questions you can answer and studies you can perform.
(I’m no myrmecologist, but if I were, I might even use 3D networks to study the movement and spatial behavior of ants.)
The 5-minute test drive
How about taking five minutes or so to generate a 3D route on your own?
By following the steps in this section, you can use ArcScene and Network Analyst geoprocessing tools to find the best route between points in a multistory building.
What you need:
- ArcGIS Desktop 10
- A license for the ArcGIS Network Analyst extension
- A license for the ArcGIS 3D Analyst extension
- Network Analyst tutorial data from the ArcGIS Tutorial Data media.
Steps:
- Using Windows explorer, navigate to the 3DRouting folder, which is included with the Network Analyst tutorial data. (By default, this tutorial data is installed at C:arcgisArcTutorNetwork AnalystWorkflow3DRouting.)
- Double-click 3DRouting.sxd.ArcScene opens showing a three-story building.
- Click the Catalog button on the Standard toolbar. The Catalog window appears.
- In the Catalog window, expand Home – Workflow3DRouting > 3DRoutingTools.tbs.
- Double-click Find best route. The Find best route dialog box opens; however, if a message appears instead indicating the tool isn’t licensed, follow these substeps:
a. Click OK.
b. Click Customize > Extensions on the menu bar to open the Extensions dialog box.
c. Check Network Analyst and click Close.
d. Try double-clicking Find best route in the Catalog window again. - Click the Add Features button.
7. Click on a line that represents a hallway to add a stop.
8. Repeat the previous two steps to add another stop.
9. Click OK. The tool finds the fastest walking route between the stops and displays the route with a green tube.
You can use the tool again to find the best route that avoids stairs (for wheelchair accessibility) or avoids elevators (for emergency evacuation routes).
If you’d like to learn more, see the Help topic Analysis on 3D network datasets.
Content provided by Robert Garrity
Viewing tubes / pipes in ArcGlobe
Some users have noticed that the option to display lines using 3D Simple Line symbols – tubes, strips and walls – is not available in ArcGlobe. This is a current technical limitation with ArcGlobe’s rendering pipeline (which has not been addressed in 10 or 10.1).
So, if you need them, how do you display tubes in ArcGlobe? The answer is to generate multipatch features from the displayed geometry in ArcScene.
The process is fairly simple:
-
Symbolize your line data in ArcScene as tubes (using a 3D Simple Line Symbol)
- Use the Layer 3D to Feature Class GP tool to create a new multipatch feature class from the symbolized layer.
- Then display the multipatch data in ArcGlobe
Things to be aware of:
-
Do not ratchet up the tube ‘Quality’ slider when you define the layer – this will minimize the number of triangles to be displayed later
-
Generate a full data cache for that layer in ArcGlobe (available on the layer’s context menu in the TOC
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Aggressively use the distance-based visibility setting so you don’t see too many tubes at once
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The layer will work marginally better as “floating” (ie: has absolute z-values embedded) than as “draped”
For those unfamiliar with multipatch features, it is simply a geometry type (like points, lines and polygons) where the geometry is captured in 3D triangles. Like all other geometry types, it supports database concepts such as attribute fields, subtypes, relationship classes and table joins. Multipatch layers can also use the various rendering options, such as attribute-driven colors, distance-based visibility, HTML popups, etc.
It’s also worth mentioning that the most current release of ArcGIS 3D Analyst (soon to be 10.0 SP2) contains a significant amount of performance improvements for displaying multipatches.
Nathan Shephard
3Dteam
Adjusting image / raster display quality in ArcScene
One question we hear a lot is “why does my high-resolution aerial imagery get downscaled when I add it into ArcScene?” The answer is that ArcScene automatically reduces all imagery resolution because ArcScene is memory-based and if your image is large (and exceeds available memory), ArcScene can become unresponsive. Think of the automatic downscaling as a self-defense mechanism.
So, while you can’t change the default resolution of the imagery as it’s added into ArcScene, you can adjust the image resolution using a quality control slider after it’s in your document. The quality slider is on the raster layer’s Layer Properties dialog, under the Rendering tab, and is titled “Quality enhancement for raster images”. Move it one step to the right and click OK. The image should improve. Navigate around and, if you’re still happy with performance, try another notch up.
If you reach ArcScene’s performance limit and the image quality STILL isn’t good enough for your needs, then you will need to clip out a new, raster image for your area of interest, and then repeat the process of finding the most appropriate display quality on the slider. You can also keep the larger, full extent image in the Scene document (with a lower resolution) for general background, if needed to provide context.
The trick is to adjust the slider one step at a time, until you find the optimum “display vs performance” setting that you are after for this particular doc. This value is hard to predict because it is also reliant upon what other layers are inside your ArcScene view. Also, because it’s difficult to test for contiguous chunks of available memory before attempting to allocate it, you should save your document often.
Nathan Shepard
3Dteam
