We run dozens of UAVs in our large AEC company and have a huge BIM unit working on and with 3D data (mainly Revit and IFC). I knew ArcGIS Earth existed, but never found the time so have a look into it. Seems like that was a mistake - there are a couple of really interesting features. We use Pix4D for our enterprise drone operations and recently got a request from one of our larger UAV teams that they have issues with sharing larger datasets on the Pix4D cloud, since it won't support large scale Orthomosaic hosting. That's why they approached us with the following requirements:
1.) be able to host and show performant Orthomosaics regardless of size (20+ km of high res UAV data) --> check (hosted on ArcGIS Enterprise and viewed super smoothly on ArcGIS Earth)
2.) be able to draw elevation profiles from point clouds (or DEMs derived from those point clouds) --> check (very nice tool in ArcGIS Earth)
...so far, so good - but there would be some additional tools that are requested and that would be super nice to have in ArcGIS Earth. With those, we could really think about ditching Pix4D entirely to be honest:
3.) be able to export those elevation profiles not just as png files (as it is now), but also as dxf, csv or kml
4.) also add other export options for points, lines, polygons (again dxf, csv or shp would be nice in addition to kml)
5.) ab able to calculate volumes (like the Polygon Volume function does from 3D Analyst, but with more base elevation options, not just elevations at a constant height...Pix4D offers base elevations with interpolated vertices heights, min, max, avg, fixed value or imported polygons).
6.) be able to show/download attachments that are part of 3D features...in the Scene viewer it works as intended, in ArcGIS Earth it just shows the name (here a short screen cap)
7.) there seems to be a bug with visualizing ground when zooming closer to the object on this global scene (here another screen cap)
8.) this would be a very nice to have thing in the long run: also show 3D models hosted on AGOL/Enterprise (Revit or at least multipatch features)
€dit: oh I just found that 3D models from DXF and IFC were deprecated recently? Such a shame...those are probably the most important file types in the AEC industry.
