Dissolving Merged Multipatches

[WinnKetchum]

Hello All,

Was wondering if anybody knows how to successfully dissolve borders of multipatches in ArcGIS.  I tried doing this for 3 merged multipatches and got a most useless 999 error.  Any help in figuring how to make one multipatch feature out of overlapping multipatch features would be very appreciated.

Thank you

[EricRice]

Greetings,

Have you tried using the Union 3D tool? 

Eric

[WinnKetchum]

Eric,

Tried Union 3D on merged multipatch features and ArcGIS crashes everytime (whether in ArcScene or ArcCatalog).  Any idea why its not working?

Thanks,

Winn

[EricRice]

Hi Winn,

The set operator tools are highly memory intensive.  Do you have complex multipatches?  Can you post a screenshot of the input?  How much RAM is on your system?  What SP do you have installed?  Have you tried running it on a smaller dataset just to get the feel for how it works?  How was the input created? 

Regards,
Eric

[WinnKetchum]

Eric,

I didn't think they were complex multipatches, but maybe they are with regards to calculating the union.  On my system I have ArcGIS 10 with SP 3 and 4 GB of RAM.  Attached is a jpeg of the multipatches I am trying to union.  There are 3 multipatches which were combined into one input using the Merge tool. 

Thanks,
Winn

[EricRice]

Ok - Thanks for the screenshot and info. Those features do not appear to be complex.  I would suggest installing SP4 at this point although I couldn't find a bug that was fixed to specificaly address this issue.  Can you contact Support to provide us the data? Or if it is small enough and your willing to, just zip it up and post it on the forum.  I can test it.

Eric

[WinnKetchum]

Eric,

Attached is a zipped folder containing a file geodatabase that includes the multipatches I want to union (Multipatch 1, 2, and 3).  I was able to merge 1 and 2 (Multipatch12_Merge) and then union 3D them (Multipatch12_Union).  I then merged this last feature with Multipatch3, made sure they were all closed, and then tried to union them.  This is when ArcGIS crashed again, and so I am not sure if it is at this point that ArcGIS crashes.

Thanks for your help,

Winn

[EricRice]

Winn,

I found that if you merge all three into one, then run Union 3D, you can get the desired output.  If I follow your workflow, I do see a crash.  I'm going to test 10.1 behavior and submit a bug if need be.  Did you try merging/unioning all of them in one shot?  We tested several 10.0 sp4 machines here and they all seemed to work fine.

Eric