Campus Light Illumination

SamLipscomb

Please forgive me if this is the wrong forum, but...

I am looking to calculate the illumination of lights on a campus. However, I have no idea where to start. I have not really had much practice dealing with the 3D/Spatial tools; I mostly dealt with the Network Analyst tools in the past.

I have found other instances of people doing something similar, but they don't really mention what tools they used or the steps they used to get there.  I am imagining the output to be a raster with cell values higher near the lights and lower away depending on the type, height, etc of the bulb.  I have found some equations that will help me calculate this, I just don't know where to begin in ArcMap.  So, does anyone have any advice or resources that I could use/follow to get started?  I'm looking forward to learning, I just need some help getting started.

Thanks,
Sam

Anonymous User

To get you started, I would create a point feature class representing campus lights (if you haven't already) and fill in some attributes such as light type.  You could then use the Euclidean Distance tool to represent the illumination from the lights (bright by the light then fading to dark).

For example, suppose you have 3 different light types.  Type A can illuminate up to 30 feet, Type B can illuminate up to 50 feet, Type C can illuminate up to 75 feet.  You could then select the points by each type and use the Euclidean distance tool using 30 feet for the max distance for type A, 50 feet for type B, and so on.  This will represent the light illumination if you use the white to black color ramp. 

In this case, the low values will be the brighter spots and the higher values will be darker as you're moving away from the lights.  This is a very basic scenario but this will get you pointed in the right direction.

Link to Euclidean Distance
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//009z0000001p000000.htm

Another option is to use buffers.