Latest Contributions by LechKar_owicz

Hello, I'm in a situation where I have a source MultiPatch feature class (3d models of a city) in which every wall is represented as a different feature (object). I'm trying to make something usefull out of it, ie. aggregate features into buildings or 'buildings fitting in a square grid'. I've tried 'ordinary' ArcGIS tools for merging 3D features, but with no acceptable results. 'Multipatch to collada' tool generates a single collada file for every object in the source multipatch which means thousands distinct collada files, everyone with one triangle in it. If I want to Union 3D the source multipatch, I have to enclose it first. But enclosing (Enclose Multipatch) the source multipatch gives all kinds of strange effects - missing walls, some polygons connected, that should not be connected etc. (I guess it's because of quite a high detail of the source models). So I've tried to switch to Data Interoperability extension. What I managed to do here is to aggregate (Aggregate Transformer) all the features in the multipatch into one feature (potentially I guess I can merge source multipatch features into separate features based on their belonging to a square grid, or some different suitable criteria). Unfortunately it does not 'clean up' the mesh, so I get a 'polygon soup' which exported to KML (my target format)/Collada gives me a collada file with one object in it, which is composed of thousands of sub-objects - the original features (walls). I could open it in a 3rd party 3D editing application to clean it up, but if the file is too big or has too rich structure (hundreds of thousands of the sub-objects) and it freezes all the applications I've tried. The interesting transformer which according to documentation does what I want to do - MeshMerger - seems to do nothing for me. I've tried several different inputs and it always writes 0 features out of x features read. When I insert inspector point before the MeshMerger I can see all the 3D city in the Viewer, but I can't merge it and output to any format (obj, multipatch, kml, collada). The only workarounds I've found are: - manual one - importing the source multipatch (the one with thousands of objects) into CityEngine, manually merging it from there and exporting as kml/multipatch - aggregating the multipatch into single feature in Data Interoperability and writing it to obj format, which gives me a single, reasonably sized object which can be edited in 3D editing software for removing duplicated vertices etc. Any help that gives more explanation in the matter of MeshMerger transformer than the rather superficial documentation: http://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Transformers/FMETransformers.htm#Transformers/meshmerger.htm wold be appreciated. Best regards, Lech ... View more

Hello, my colleague asked me to help him in resolving his trouble with querying multipatch feature class through REST service. I tried to search the documentation but found nothing, so I ask here. When querying such a service we keep getting "Invalid or missing input parameters." message. We've got 'Return Z' enabled. Query definition we use is as simple as 'OBJECTID = 1'. I noticed that we get results when we disable 'Return Geometry', but the geometry is something important for us. Is it possible to query multipatch for geometry through REST at all? Thanks in advance for replies. Lech ... View more

I'm exploring ways of converting 3D GIS data from ArcGIS to kml/kmz format for GoogleEarth and I keep running into all kinds of troubles. From what I understand there are three ways of exporting to kml: 1. Multipatch to collada - it creates a collada file as well as a kml with the spatial reference of the model. There are three problems here. The first is the shader/material that gets created for every part of the exported model. It is simply shadeless which does not look good at all. You can see it on the first model on the first attached image. The second problem is that the multipatch is split into a few separate models (eg. floor, roof, walls.. the more complex the model the more parts get created). It duplicates vertices and gives them normals with directions different than it would be on a single-part model (it may be, I don't know if it is in fact, a problem, cause some problems with lightning). I can open the collada model in some kind of 3rd party 3D graphics editor then remove the materials (or change them to shaded ones) and join all the geometries into one model. But why isn't it done during the export process? The last but not least problem is that collada models georeferenced by the kml file created by Multipatch to collada tool have... offseted rotation. You can see it on the second attached image (compared to the same multipatch exported with Layer To KML). 2. Layer To KML - it gives me some strange flickering triangles here and there and some of the triangles that were present on the multipatch it was created from are missing. I tried doing it with models of different origins (different companies providing models of 3D cities, simple extruded polygons and it's still a problem). It also creates a Multi Geometry kml from which only the first element can be edited in GoogleEarth so you can't do the cleaning up in it. 3. The ArcGlobe - ArcMap Map to KML way (described here. I can't provide an image, because the kmls generated that way keep crashing my GoogleEarth... Am I doing it all wrong? [ATTACH=CONFIG]17246[/ATTACH] Fig. 1 Starting from the left: model obtained by Multipatch to collada, model obtained with Layer To KML, 2D vector layer extruded inside Google Earth. [ATTACH=CONFIG]17247[/ATTACH] Fig. 2 Comparison of two models - the darker one was exported with Layer To KML, and the lighter with Multipatch to collada. Notice that the models are not aligned (rotation) correctly. ... View more