idea gaussian blur to polygon borders in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

gaussian blur to polygon borders

SteveGautreau — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 20:22:22 GMT

I have a feature class of mulitple polygons. The borders of these polygons have to be blurred or fuzzy to remove the hard outlines and blend the polygons into eachother.

My current workflow involves using the Blur effect in QGIS to create the desired effect OR create the map in Arc and then add in the edge blur to the polygon layer in inkscape or illustrator (too time consuming for multiple maps that are constantly revised).

Workflow is fastest in QGIS as it is a built-in draw effect that you can apply to the symbology.

In ArcGIS, the gradients work great only from the border inward (hard boundaries are still obvious).

I tried using the gradient stroke on the polygons in Arc Pro but it applies it to both sides of the border making it obvious where the original hard boundaries occurred.

I basically need the edges of the polygons to blur into eachother like this...

Re: gaussian blur to polygon borders

EveHayden — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 04:07:52 GMT

Did you find a solution to this?

Re: gaussian blur to polygon borders

SteveGautreau — Thu, 19 May 2022 19:36:42 GMT

No. My current solution is to either use QGIS or post-process the map in inkscape to create the blurring effect.

Re: gaussian blur to polygon borders

ChrisJacob — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 04:59:58 GMT

Have you tried duplicating symbol layers and using transparency, and offsets (both negative (inside) and positive (outside)) ?

John Nelson (of course) has a video on how to show uncertainty in polygon edges, and he shows a few ideas in about 10 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8nyNwKTJlc It can be quite a bit of work in setup, but the effects you can achieve are quite attractive.

Re: gaussian blur to polygon borders

SteveGautreau — Tue, 21 May 2024 18:02:18 GMT

Thanks for the link and suggestions.

Its a good attempt and comes close to blurring the edges but with certain colour overlaps still makes a somewhat definitive boundary, though harder to see.

ESRI has provdied this feathering option to Arc Online. I do not know why they cannot extend it to Arc Pro.

Re: gaussian blur to polygon borders

JamesPoeschel — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:08:48 GMT

I definitely would like this. I usually push to illustrator. But it's annoying to have to do this every time just to apply a blur effect.