Best Aerial Image Format for Working in ArcScene

[marieducharme]

Hello All, I am a total neeby at ArcScene - I worked a bit with it 2 yrs ago at school, and used it a bit when I did the 3D analyst trial last year.

Now I have the extension, and want to use ArcScene. From my experiece, it this software has a few glitches, and I am hoping that somebody out there has some tips on "best practices" for Arc Scence.

I tried to add a aerial image in .ecw format, and it crashed as soon as I tried to set the base height to be floating on a custom surface (which appears to work fine if the aerial is in .tif format. I also tried to mosaic a few adjacent .tif tiles inot a raster dataset, but lost a lot of resolution - the raster dataset appears really grainy in ArcScene.

So I am wondering, what is the best image format to use in ArcScene? Should I  bother to try to mosaic my tiles into one raster dataset*?

* I am trying to do that to avoid the white lines betwen the tiles that results from the image being streched over the landscape (as seen in the screenshot attached).

Any tips are appreciated!

Marishka

[JeffreySwain]

In ArcScene, you have to be mindful of the amount of memory that is required to display the data.  In the help documentation to optimize ArcScene, you should increase the virtual memory, be sure your graphics card driver is updated and then adjust the settings on ArcScene to disable the expensive layers on navigation. 

An ecw would be a bad choice in ArcScene due to the uncompressed size of the file and what ArcScene must do to modify it as described by the base heights.  In general ArcScene is better for smaller areas and it is recommended that you project all of the data into the same coordinate system to avoid the memory usage to transform the data. There is also more help on tips to display rasters here.  If you have a larger or data heavy display I recommend ArcGlobe.

I would limit the scene of what you want to say to a specific area, be sure all of the coordinate systems match and then customize the view setting if you need more.  Also try to turn off any memory expensive operations on the machine to improve the performance.

[marieducharme]

Thanks for the informative reply Jeff.  I have converted my ecw to a tiff, and have all my laters in the same coordinate systems and things are running much much more smoothly now and allocated more to my virtual memory. I will look into your recommendations -althoug i am not sure how to check is my video card driver is up to date.....


About the following information you provided....

In general ArcScene is better for smaller areas and it is recommended that you project all of the data into the same coordinate system to avoid the memory usage to transform the data. There is also more help on tips to display rasters here.  If you have a larger or data heavy display I recommend ArcGlobe.

Can you provide some more information on what would be considered a "small" versus a "large" area. This is raterh hard to interpret. What is large? A whole city block, a whole city, or a whole county or a whole state? It depends on your perspective, really....On the same line, how much data is too much data?

Thanks a million Jeff,

Marishka

[JeffreySwain]

There are no hard and fast rules for what is large and small, but there are recommendations outlined here for specific workflows.   The document describes certain situation, but I would consider the amount of data being consumed and the complexity of the document.  The larger the display, the more I would gravitate to ArcGlobe. Also if you create a ArcScene document and the display is choppy, I would consider moving it to ArcGlobe.  I would start with ArcScene and then push to ArcGlobe then, unless you already know you have a lot of data, which ArcScene won't handle or know you are covering a larger geographic area.