ESRI Terrain: Prioritizing and fusing multiple data sources (v2)

[RustyRex]

When creating large terrain over many areas, it is not always feasible to have a single elevation data source. For flood studies in particular, you could have lidar, ground surveys and perhaps even USGS DEM. All of these can be incorporated into an ESRI terrain, but there is usually overlap. You can using geoprocessing to eliminate the overlaps (erase, clip, etc.), but this can be time consuming and difficult (especially with lidar multipoints).

Is there any way in within the ESRI terrain to eliminate the overlaps by perhaps prioritizing features within the dataset. A water resources example: Build terrain in the channel based on survey mass points (this would either be defined by the data extent or a user defined extent mask), build terrain outside that area using the lidar mass points (maybe the floodplain extent), then use the USGS DEM for the terrain outside of the first two for the remainder of the watershed. I havent found any prioritization or extent options in ESRI terrain. Is it available or are there any easy workflows that could accomplish the same goals?

[ClaytonCrawford]

There isn't masking or prioritization but there are fairly efficient means of modifying large multipoint feature classes via new tools in ArcGIS 10: AppendTerrainPoints, DeleteTerrainPoints, and ReplaceTerrainPoints.

- The tools are designed to modify referenced or embedded (multi)point feature classes that participate in a terrain. They edit in place rather than write out new datasets which can be expensive with big datasets

- The tools allow for the area(s) of interest to be defined via polygon features.

- The tools can be used after the terrain is defined but before it's built. So, this relatively expensive process need only be run once to create the final, edited, usable terrain. You can create a terrain (just the schema definition) using either the Terrain Wizard in ArcCatalog or the Create Terrain GP tool.