topic Re: Artifacts in scene layer in Scene Viewer Questions

Artifacts in scene layer

ShannonAK — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:11:50 GMT

In the last two weeks, artifacts have appeared in imagery (see below) when I view it in scene viewer. This doesn't happen when I open the same data as a scene layer package in ArcGIS Pro. Has anyone else had this same issue?

Thanks!

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasHall — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 06:52:32 GMT

My initial guess is that these artifacts are located in the elevation model, not in the imagery. The imagery is projected on to the elevation model in a scene. Are you using identical elevation models in the scene viewer and in Pro?

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasUlmer — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 11:29:04 GMT

With the 4.30 release, we "Added shading to IntegratedMesh3DTilesLayer and IntegratedMeshLayer"
(https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/release-notes/#bug-fixes-and-enhancements).
In case your imagery is an integrated mesh this likely explains the visual difference.

In this context, surface normals (the local direction of the surface) on integrated mesh are used to shade (apply lighting to) the surface. This helps to improve realism under specific lighting conditions and integrate IntegratedMesh data better into the scene (since most scene elements are being shaded this way). Shading also helps to understand the shape of the integrated mesh better, but at the same time might expose issues in the data set. In the case at hand it seems that the data has incorrect normals at tile borders (normals not properly interpolated across borders), which get more visible now due to shading.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

ArthurJensen — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 19:05:32 GMT

How do we turn off the new lighting feature or revert to a prior version? Our workflow has no means for adjusting tiling smooth normals, and the data sets that come in from photogrammetry have prebaked lighting, meaning extra lighting information is noisy.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

ShannonAK — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 20:29:46 GMT

Thank you for your response.

Do you have a suggestion on how to address this issue? Is there a work around so that incorrect normals at tile borders aren't visible?

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasUlmer — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 12:22:00 GMT

@ShannonAK, @ArthurJensen: are you using SceneViewer on ArcGIS Online? Or a custom application built with ArcGIS Maps SDK for Javascript?

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

ArthurJensen — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 14:06:52 GMT

Just regular ArcGIS scene viewer. Nothing fancy. This worked for years with 0 artifacts and 0 post processing until the 4.30 release.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasUlmer — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 15:03:13 GMT

In ArcGIS Online SceneViewer, you can add this url parameter to disable the new integrated mesh shading:
&disableFeatures=im-shading
This should get you back to the pre-4.30 state. Does this work for you as a workaround for the moment?

And FYI, we are reconsidering this behavior for 4.31, but no decisions yet.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

ShannonAK — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 18:01:49 GMT

As suggested, I added &disableFeatures=im-shading to the end of the url for AGOL SceneViewer and it seems to have broken it.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasUlmer — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:33:51 GMT

@Shannon
Is the screenshot what you get after applying &disableFeatures=im-shading?
That should not happen of course. Is there a chance you could share the problematic scene with us (the url), with an instruction how to exactly get to the problem? It's hard to say more without seeing the actual problem.
In case you don't want to share the url publicly you can also DM (direct message) me.

Also, confused why you marked the case as solved. Was this done by accident?

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasUlmer — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 16:05:08 GMT

Update: we can now reproduce the broken drawing as seen in the screenshot, and are looking into it.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

ShannonAK — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 23:55:25 GMT

Thanks for the update and yes, I marked it solved by accident.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

AndreasUlmer — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 13:55:13 GMT

We identified the problem of the broken drawing shown in the screenshot (the funky colorful triangles) when applying &disableFeatures=im-shading

SceneLayers (which includes Integrated Mesh Layer) are cached in the browser's indexedDB for performance reasons
a slightly different version of integrated mesh data gets cached when the url parameter &disableFeatures=im-shading is set
loading a non-matching version from the indexedDB cache causes the broken rendering

The fix/workaround: when switching between im-shading disabled and enabled using the url parameter, the browser's indexedDB cache must manually be deleted

Clear SceneLayer indexedDB in Chrome (similar in other browsers):

open developer tools
navigate to Application tab
under Storage / IndexedDB, select esri-scenelayer-cache
click Delete database

Apologies for the inconvenience on this, we hope this workaround is sufficient for you for the moment.
And as stated earlier, we are revisiting this behavior for the upcoming 4.31 release.

-----

I marked it solved by accident.

FYI, I marked it as unsolved again for now.

Re: Artifacts in scene layer

ShannonAK — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 17:18:59 GMT

Thank you for providing this workaround, the artifacts are gone from my scene layer. I look forward to the 4.31 release.