topic Re: Is it possible to generalize or simplify only a part of a polygon? in ArcGIS Pro Questions

Is it possible to generalize or simplify only a part of a polygon?

jamesw — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 20:56:36 GMT

I have a couple of service area polygons that aren't lining up as smoothly as I would like. Because of the complicated street network, they are zig-zagging alongside each other and it isn't really representative of the final area that I'm going to produce.

This is just a draft so I don't want to spend a lot of time getting everything perfect, I am hoping to essentially select the ~1/3 of one of the feature's vertices and smooth it out. After that, I want to update the neighbor by tracing, but that should be straightforward.

Is there a tool that lets me simplify/generalize a selected portion (ex: the points circled in red in the image) of a whole polygon, while not changing the other vertices?

Re: Is it possible to generalize or simplify only a part of a polygon?

jcarlson — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 21:23:30 GMT

I'm not aware of a way to selectively generalize like that, but you could probably just use the reshape tool.

Re: Is it possible to generalize or simplify only a part of a polygon?

jamesw — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 21:26:21 GMT

Hi Josh, thanks for the tip. I wound up doing a quick polygon > line > split > merge > line to polygon workflow. Certainly not efficient, but I came to your same conclusion that there isn't a way (at present) to selectively generalize.

If I need to do it again, I'll test out reshape. Thanks again!

Re: Is it possible to generalize or simplify only a part of a polygon?

Scott_Harris — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 12:54:47 GMT

@jamesw it's possible using multiple steps, including Reshape. Here's a simple example:

The steps are:

Trace the portion of the feature you want to reshape using a temporary line
Generalize that temporary line
Reshape the target feature by using the Trace construction tool. One tip here is to only make the temporary line snappable because trace will only trace along snappable layers.

Doing this just using Generalize is an existing Idea that we are considering: https://community.esri.com/t5/arcgis-pro-ideas/generalize-selected-vertices-within-line-or/idi-p/936790