Introduction + Forestry Hub 3D Visualizations

Question

Hi everyone,

I am happy to introduce myself and get involved with this community of Esri users and developers. My name is Nathan, I am a urban forestry consultant with Davey Resource Group working out of Oceanside, California. Currently, I am a project manager on our Urban Forest Planning Team, and I work with municipalities and large land owners across the western United States.

Recently, we developed a robust full scale Forestry Hub for a private client with heavy development using Experience Builder. I am interested and motivated to take this product to the next level and am wondering if anyone in this community has experience with producing 3D visualizations for Experience Builder (using photogrammetry and LiDAR is a method that has worked for us so far).

Additionally, I want to know if anyone here has experience with using Unreal Engine to produce virtual reality content that has been embedded into a Hub or Experience Builder app. Looking to make Operational Management Virtual Dashboards within Experience Builder for forestry managers,

Thank you,

Nathan Davila

NathanDavila · Answer

Oh that's great! Yes please, I would be happy to connect with anyone working in the same direction of applying these tools. Even if it's not forestry, as I feel this goes beyond the single field alone.

Quick update: I switched to using Powerpoint for quick animations - inserting the live graph from excel, duplicating the scatter plot across multiple slides and filtering which data set to be presented. Exporting as a video and dropping into the story map potentially with voice over audio is the next move.

Feel free to reach out for more updates Chris. Thank you,

Chris_Sanders · Answer

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for the helpful context. I’m not in the field as a consultant, but as an Account Manager at Esri supporting forestry teams, I’m always trying to understand the real challenges you’re facing. The storytelling hurdle makes total sense, especially with LiDAR inventories and so much data to convey quickly.

Animations sound like a strong direction, and Flourish seems like a promising way to prototype without a lot of extra effort. If you put together a proof of concept, I’d love to see how it turns out. And if I come across folks working with similar 3D or animated visualization workflows, I’ll definitely connect you.

I appreciate you sharing your process.

NathanDavila · Answer

Hi Chris,

I appreciate your response here. Are you also working as a consultant in the field? Right now, the storytelling aspect of our work is the biggest hurdle that I have been using animated graphs and story maps to help with. For example, our team has been performing urban forest inventories via LiDAR and now have a mountain of tree data measurements. My core question from this past week was: "How do you tell the story of 20 graphs in 30 seconds?" - the only answer I have come up with is "Animations". I started exploring a tool called "Fluorish" this morning that may or may not work. I could manually produce this animation using Procreate on my iPad, but for now I am going for proof of concept with the scatter plot animations and working towards embedding that component into the story map platform.