Showing 3d line of Power line _sagging of the power line

[ThillaiNadarajan]

I would like to represent in 3d Schene the power lines with power poles and sagging of the power lines (curve downwords).

Please advise.

[TimBarnes]

This would either need to be modelled (i.e. create a proper 3D model of powerlines with the sagging in) or if you are handy with python, you can write a script to model the Z shift of each vertex along the line by iterating through a list of offsets.

[ThillaiNadarajan]

Hi Tom,

Thank you.

I do not have experience in phython.

Regards
Thillai

[DavidPetrey1]

Hi,

Only just saw this one and thought I would offer up a solution.

There are several steps to this:
-Get the points representing the towers holding up the wires (these may be the end points of each power line or you may hold them as a separate dataset) and give them an attribute representing the height of the power line at that location (eg 100metres)
-Get the mid points between the towers (there are various ways to do this �?? split the power lines in half or use trigonometry with the tower coordinates) and give these a value that the power lines sag down to (eg 80 metres).
-Combine the 2 point files into 1 dataset.
-Use interpolation such as IDW to create a raster surface using the height values chosen above.
-Use the raster surface created as the heights for your power lines in ArcScene.

Hope this helps. I actually use this technique in the 3D Analyst course I teach at work.

Please mark this as answered if it helped.

David
simplyGIS Ltd. Making GIS simple.
http://www.simplyGIS.co.uk/GISTraining.html
http://www.simplyGIS.co.uk/GISTraining/ArcGIS/3D.html

[ThillaiNadarajan]

Hi David,

Thank you.

I received a similiar reply from Jie also.

Regards
Thillai