topic Re: Failure to create TIN from countour data. in 3D Questions

Failure to create TIN from countour data.

OrhanGUNDUZ — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 09:28:03 GMT

Hi guys:

I have a bunch of countour tiles (154 to be exact) with a total of about 440000 objects that I want to create TIN from. 3DAnalyst reports the following error and stops execution:

Failed to add features from contours

Attempt made to access an empty object
Failure to create TIN.

Any ideas why that might happen.

Thanks.

OG

Platform: ArcGIS 9.3.1 running on a Win7 machine.

Re: Failure to create TIN from countour data.

EricRice — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:58:07 GMT

Greetings,

TIN's have a physical limit of ~15 million data nodes. If you build a TIN with just one tile of contours, and check the properties of the TIN, how many data nodes does it have? This should help you somewhat estimate the total node count of all contour tiles. You're most likely way over 15 million since every vertice in the contour is considered a node. Ideally, you should only put 4 or 5 million data nodes in a TIN for performance reasons. You should consider building a Geodatabase terrain dataset.

What is a terrain dataset?
(Terrains exist in 9.3.1 even though this is the 10.1 help link)

Best,
Eric

Re: Failure to create TIN from countour data.

OrhanGUNDUZ — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:59:19 GMT

Dear Eric:

Thanks for the info. I did indeed have approx. 29 million data points. I succeeded to create a TIN from a file geodatabase. But I eventually have to get this terrain saved as a raster grid where I could do some map calculations. Is it possible to convert and save this TIN to a raster?

Thanks,

Orhan Gunduz

Re: Failure to create TIN from countour data.

EricRice — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:30:17 GMT

See TIN to Raster or Terrain to Raster tools.

Eric

Re: Failure to create TIN from countour data.

OrhanGUNDUZ — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:04:55 GMT

Eric:

Thanks for the info. I was aware of the TIN to raster command but that did not work in 9.3 (probably due to size limitations). It worked flawlessly in 10.1.

Cheers,

Orhan

Re: Failure to create TIN from countour data.

JakubSisak — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:55:08 GMT

TIN created from countours will be extremely complex. You can greatly improve performance by generalizing the TIN. (Terrain and TIN Surface -> Decimate TIN Nodes) This will produce a generalized version of the input TIN based on parameters you specify. (ie Z Tolerance or maximum number of nodes)