Fix Scene Occlusion conflicts with 3D Meshes and Imagery/Ground layers

[Marc_Graham]

Hi,

In the ArcGIS Enterprise/Online 3D Scene viewer 3D Meshes often appear in the view over Raster/Imagery/Ground layers.  This results in some very unnatural results and is very disorienting to the user.

For example in this scene a large hill is circled in red and a mesh model is circled in blue:

When I change to a low angle the mesh is visible through the hill.  This looks really bad and is not at all how it should behave: 

Can you please improve the interaction of different layers so they make sense visually.  If objects are behind something else they should not be seen:

Thanks,
marc

[Marc_Graham]

I made a video to show this more clearly.

[Anonymous User]

Thanks for the images and the video to help document.  This is a problem we need to look at-  there's no workarounds or ways to fix this.  

[Marc_Graham]

Hi there,

I just loaded a slpk into ArcGIS Pro 3.1 and I see that no progress has been made on this issue.  The mesh layers are still showing when they should be hidden behind draped tile layers.  This makes the whole 3D visualisation look like trash, and also makes it hard for the user to interpret the relationship between different layers.

I have highlighted areas of the mesh that should be obscured by the basemap but aren't.

@Andrew--Johnson in your recent what's new with scene layers post you asked for ideas for future releases - This is my idea from nearly two years ago that needs to be implemented asap.  

Cheers,

Marc

[Andrew--Johnson]

@Marc_Graham  This idea is specific to the Scene Viewer in ArcGIS Enterprise but in your comment you mentioned ArcGIS Pro so I just want to clarify where you are targeting this idea if it's just Scene Viewer or also ArcGIS Pro.

thanks,

Andrew

[Marc_Graham]

Apologies, I guess it's the whole ecosystem right? The interaction between the tile layers and mesh layers appears to be consistent across ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise/Online.  I'll create a new idea for ArcGIS Pro if you prefer and cross-reference to this one.

[Andrew--Johnson]

@Marc_Graham ok thanks for clarifying. No need to create a new idea for the time being but i'll follow up with a couple teams to get an update on this. While of course we do always try to ensure a seamless experience across the clients, there are separate teams that have various priorities given user requirements. I'll see what I can find out and post back here.

thanks for your time,

Andrew

[Andrew--Johnson]

@Marc_Graham 

After discussing this with some other folks, I have some more information. Integrated mesh layers are currently designed to be always displayed on top of other content in the scene. All clients (ArcGIS Pro, Scene Viewer, JSAPI apps etc) use stencil buffering that allows the mesh to draw into another buffer and display it on top of the rest of the ground at the end of each frame. This is why the mesh is not occluded by other ground-based draped content.

We do currently have on the ArcGIS Pro roadmap the ability to use Integrated Mesh layers as part of the Ground Elevation Surface which would ameliorate these effects. This is a major design change though that would have impact across the ArcGIS Platform and is not a trivial change that can be implemented quickly. There may be other smaller design changes we can make such as allowing you to turn of the stencil-buffering but we will explore this with other teams to determine the best outcome.

Moving forward this idea is not getting traction in the ArcGIS Enterprise ideas so I will move this to the ArcGIS Pro ideas and keep you updated as new information arrives.

thanks,

Andrew

[Marc_Graham]

Hi @Andrew--Johnson,

Thanks for the update. I'm glad this is getting some attention internally.  

The only reservation I have about using integrated mesh as part of the ground layer is would this result in the texture being lost?  

For example we might have aerial imagery and a DEM of a building site and have multiple mesh models  from Drone photogrammetry in place on the site.  I would not want to have the mesh textures replaced but the aerial images.

Thanks again for taking the time to look into this. 

Marc

[Andrew--Johnson]

@Marc_Graham 

Currently, if you have a raster or tin and move those into the ground you lose the symbology so if integrated mesh followed the same pattern then you would have an operational layer which drives the symbology and a separate elevation source layer that drives the elevation. We'll explore all possible designs though and I will keep you posted as to how that progresses.

thanks,

Andrew