As you can see, the extruded buildings in the previous section, are blocks with no details, just the elevation. In this section, you will learn how to present part of west campus with more details. To do so, you should remove some of the features from UP_BUILDINGS that overlap with the layer that has more detailed information. This new layer (UP_Roof_Segments), that you will add to the map, consists of roof segments with detailed elevation. This information has been extracted from LiDAR data. In other words, instead of treating buildings as a big, undifferentiated chunk, every change in shape or elevation in each building has been detected and a new layer that represents those change/segments have been created. In Module 4, we have explained the process of creating this layer in detail.
In this section, you will remove the overlapping part of UP_BUILDINGS Layer with the P_Roof_Segment. This means that the UP_Roof_Segments represents part of campus with more details while UP_BUILDINGS will represent the rest of the campus (where the detailed model is not available) with less detail.
Therefore, you should remove the overlapping feature from UP_BUILDINGS Layer. This means that the UP_Roof_Segments represents part of campus with more details while UP_BUILDINGS will represent the rest of the campus (where the detailed model is not available) with less detail.
This is how your model should look like. You can navigate by holding down the scroll wheel or the V key and drag the pointer to tilt and rotate the scene. You can see the level of details each building presents in 3D.
To see how the buildings look like in reality, go to GoogleMaps [3]. Search for University Park Campus.
Click the earth option at the bottom of the page.
Your map will turn to Earth view.
Zoom in to Penn State Alumni Association. This is how the roofs structures look like:
Go back to your ArcGIS Pro project and find the same building. You can find the same level of detail in roof structure.
Go back to Google map and explore more. You see that some of the buildings have flat roofs and some shed roofs. However, in your 3D model, all the roofs are flat. You will add different roof types later in this module.
However, what you need to keep is the rest of the buildings, not what has been selected. Therefore, you will switch selection to select the remaining part of the campus.
In this section, you’ll add special 3D textures and models to your scene to give it a more realistic appearance. The symbology of the structures is presentable in 3D but doesn't give the impression of a realistic city model. For instance, types of roofs, roof textures or façade textures, are not defined in this type of 3D presentation. To make the campus look more realistic, you can set the layer's symbology with a rule package created in CityEngine (see Lesson 2). Rule packages contain a series of design settings that create more complex symbology. Although you cannot create rule packages in ArcGIS Pro, you can apply and modify them from an external file (more in the next lessons).
In this section, you will insert a 3D model of trees with assigned rules. In your 3D Scene, you can see that 2D symbols of trees are presented in 3D. One of the ways to show your trees in 3D is to use LiDAR information such as crown diameter and tree height along with CityEngine procedural rules. However, ArcGIS Pro does not support assigning rule packages to point layers on the Symbology pane, yet. ArcGIS Pro is under constant development and will offer this functionality in the future. A workaround is to export the tree point layer as Polygons with Z information. Then the polygons can be converted to points. The point feature class with Z information and inherited rules can be added to your map as a preset.
You have learned how to apply a rule package symbology to buildings to demonstrate a realistic view of campus. For some types of 3D analysis, an analytical demonstration may suffice. For the next Module, you will need an analytical presentation of campus. In this section, you will learn how to switch from realistic to analytical. In the next lesson, you will learn examples of 3D spatial analysis and you will need these analytical 3D models for the analysis.
In this lesson, you learned how to work with ArcGIS Pro from creating a map and symbolizing layers to exploring raster and 3D data. You also learned about symbolizing 3D layers with rule packages from CityEngine. In the next lesson, you will learn about some 3D analysis that is possible with 3D data.
Links
[1] https://chorophronesis.psu.edu/
[2] https://www.arcgis.com/features/index.html
[3] http://www.google.com/maps
[4] https://www.google.com/maps
[5] http://sites.psu.edu/chorophronesis/
[6] https://courseware.e-education.psu.edu/downloads/geog497/
[7] https://sites.psu.edu/chorophronesis/
[8] http://www.arcgis.com/apps/CEWebViewer/viewer.html?3dWebScene=6015f7d48dff4b3084de76bcf22c5bca