I am trying to add surface area to a polygon layer using the Add Surface Layer tool.. Both the polygon and DEM I want to use are in the same coordinate system. The DEM's I am using are very dense (each cell size is 1.5 inches). The tool seems to be taking an awful long time to run (or won't run at all).
About the DEM's:
I have them (about 250) split up according to the National Grid for ease of recognition. Some of my polygons cross over. So I created a Mosaic of them.
Here is what have tried:
- If I run the DEM from a raster mosaic, it freezes at about 2%.
- If I export the DEM as an image and use that, I get a little further along to 11%.
- I got it to work when I used only 1 section, used a single DEM from just that area, changed the sample distance from 1 to 1,000. The issue was this got me to 100%, but it didn't finish for another 3-5 minutes.
- I thought python might be faster, so I took the one that worked and put it in a script, that froze up.
In total I have about 230 miles of polygons to find their surface area, so I need something that at least shows consist results.
Is this usual for the tool?
Am I using the tool wrong
Is there another way to get a 3D surface area that might work better?
I have the rasters as mosaic, .asc in a geodatabase, and as individual .asc files. Does one work better than another?
