Can't get road to lay properly in AcrScene

Question

I'm a graduate student taking a GIS class so if my terminology is off please bear with me.  For the record I have the full student version of ArcGIS 10 on my personal computer.

I'm wanting to use arcscene to create a 2-D image of my study sites and the roads in them.  I've added the raster file for the area and changed the baseheights to float on a custom surface and customized that to 5 (for topography).

I've added a polyline shapefile I have of available roads and it looks like this:

My professor recommended running a polyline to raster and adding that to arcscene.  Here that is:

For the record both lines are supposed to be a road, but they're out in thin air.  Both coordinate systems are set to Nad83 zone11.  Any idea how to remedy this?

JakubSisak · Answer

I tried the tin with no success.  Any other ideas?

What was the issue with TIN? If i want to correctly display a road feature over a TIN surface I buffer the line to create a polygon that represents the road surface. I then use the road surface as a MASK to produce the Road from the TIN (1 surface) and to delete the road from the main surface (2nd TIN).  This leaves me with 2 TIN surfaces; Main surface without the road and the road surface itself. Although this means more work it gives me the ability to symbolize (color) the road and the surface independently as well as apply exaggeration without any inherent display anomaly.

PatJackson1 · Answer

Is the reason for "floating" the road 5m above the surface because it seems to be submerged in the surface in places? Are you exaggerating the scene? If so, that is probably the problem.  The road should display properly without exaggeration otherwise the road will not render properly. I had better luck draping things over TIN rather then a raster both with and without exaggeration.

I'm floating both layers because I want to show the elevation.  Even if I add an elevation of 1 to both the roads and topography part of the road is below the topography and part is above.

I tried the tin with no success.  Any other ideas?

JakubSisak · Answer

I've added the raster file for the area and changed the baseheights to float on a custom surface and customized that to 5 (for topography)

Is the reason for "floating" the road 5m above the surface because it seems to be submerged in the surface in places? Are you exaggerating the scene? If so, that is probably the problem.  The road should display properly without exaggeration otherwise the road will not render properly. I had better luck draping things over TIN rather then a raster both with and without exaggeration.