Layer to KML - why some polygons not showing up in Google Earth?

Question

Hi,

I've converted quite a few layers to KML files recently and had no problems, however with one layer I have converted when I open the KML file in Google Earth there were some polygons missing, and some showing up. Well, they're not completely missing, if I click on where they are meant to be I still get the pop up box with the attribute data, but they aren't actually showing up with a colour and outline.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks!
Renata

tchaulla · Answer

I ran into this too. Both the Simplify Polygons tool and simplifying the symbology in general didn't solve it.

Instead, I re-imported my original files and only made one change (changed the symbology), used Layer -> KML, and it worked. I'm not sure what I clicked the first time for the polygons to not show up in Google Earth as a KML. I'm writing this so that future people with this problem could try this method too.

RenataPronk1 · Answer

The simplify polygon trick worked a treat - after applying this all the polygons showed straight up in Google Earth - plus it also reduced the size of the data by quite a bit which is really useful because I was finding some of my KML files were just too huge to even load in Google Earth. Thanks so much Darren! Thanks everyone for your imput.

KevinHibma · Answer

I've spent a good amount of time searching for a documented limit and could not find one.
Through testing it seems like the cap is around 30,000 vertices for a single feature.

I've also seen complex polygon featureclasses when you have more than 10,000 features have rendering issues. (I didnt hunt it down, but maybe it was a combination of many features and many vertices together as a problem).
Well we cant "fix" this issue (the KML is correct per the spec), we added a warning in ArcGIS 10.1 when creating KML, that if you have more than 30,000 vertices, not all KML may draw correctly. This way you will have a heads up and a couple of ideas on modifying your data.

However please note, ArcGIS Explorer seems to have no problem drawing 30,000+ vertices features.