3D Visualization & Analytics

Scene Viewer Tip: Basemap galleries / scene title and icon

Throughout 2016, we will be presenting a series of ArcGIS Scene Viewer tips and tricks. We hope these posts will help you work more efficiently, produce better 3D visualizations, and really harness the power of your 2D and 3D data with the scene viewer.

Global vs. local basemap galleries

Global and local scenes are powerful tools for displaying and sharing 3D content. When working between the two types of scenes, you may notice that certain features behave differently from one type to the other. In this blog, we will be talking about the differences between global and local in the Basemap gallery.

In global scenes, the Basemap gallery allows you to only select Web Mercator basemaps. The scene viewer disables all other basemaps. This means that any configured basemaps in your gallery that are not in Web Mercator are unavailable.

In local scenes, on the other hand, the Basemap gallery can show any basemap in any projected coordinate system (PCS) as long as it meets the scene viewer requirements. So if you want to use your configured basemaps that are not Web Mercator, open a new local scene and select your basemap. Remember, you can always change your basemap as many times as you want in the gallery before you add a layer to a scene, as shown in the figure below.

Once you add a layer to a local scene, however, you will only see basemaps that match the added layer’s spatial reference (SR). In the figure below, all other basemaps are disabled. Additionally, the scene SR is now the layer’s SR.

Furthermore, capturing a slide or saving a scene will set the scene SR to the current basemap’s and will disable nonmatching basemaps. See adding a layer to a local scene for more information. The next section talks about where in the scene viewer you can quickly find the scene SR as well as additional useful scene information.

Scene title and icon

Located in the upper left corner of the scene viewer is the title of the scene with an icon showing the scene type. The title and scene icon contain key information about your scene. First, the icon next to the title in the scene viewer will show you whether it is a global scene   or a local scene  . Next, when you hover over the icon, the tooltip will display the scene type and the spatial reference ID.  This information is very important when working with local scenes. Finally, the scene title links to the portal item for that scene with additional information.

Note: The scene must be a saved scene in order for there to be a link to a portal item. The portal item contains important information about the scene such as:

  1. URL address to the portal item
  2. Summary of the scene
  3. Icon and text indicating scene type
  4. Owner of the scene
  5. Description of scene

Stay tuned here for more exciting scene viewer tips and tricks to come!  Also, take a look at scene help in ArcGIS Online to learn even more about scenes.

About the author

Matt is a product engineer living in Zurich, Switzerland. He joined Esri R&D Center Zurich in 2014 and has a passion for 3D! He currently works with the CityEngine and Scene Viewer teams.

Next Article

Version 430.1 of ArcGIS for AutoCAD (May 2024) adds support for AutoCAD 2025

Read this article