ECW Imagery - Mosaic Dataset and Tile Caches

[EthanMansfield]

Hello,

I'm currently trialling AcrGis Pro to create tile packages for use in Unreal Engine. I have a large amount of ECW files comprising the whole of the UK at varying resolutions.

I initially tried created TPKX files for each ECW file I have, which worked but it wasn't the most efficent workflow and meant that I had to add many layers within Unreal. Not ideal but defiantly workable.

I then tried combining the ECW files using the Mosaic to New Raster tool converting multiple files of one resolution to a single tif, this worked but messed up the colours and resolution.

I then tried creating a Mosaic Dataset and tried adding my ECW imagery to it (as I had done with elevation data of a different file format). However I got the following error while running the Add Rasters To Mosaic Dataset: "Error: 8004818c: No new mosaic dataset item was added". Looking online, this appears to be a known bug in 3.4.

My current workflow now is to create a VRT using QGIS containing my imagery, add this into ArcGis Pro, use "Build Pyramids And Statistics" on the VRT, Manage Tile Cache, Export Tile Cache. I'm not sure why I need to build pyramids & statistics since I thought ECW files contained internal pyramids - but if I skip this step the resulting tile cache only appears at higher zoom levels. So I think this may be a bug when using a VRT containing ECW imagery?

If anyone has any tips in speeding up this process or an alternate way to achieve the same goal it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks

[EthanMansfield · Accepted solution]

Rather than using VRTs or Mosaics I instead ended up just using a map within ArcGis Pro (rather than a scene as I had tried previously). To note for anyone in the future though, depending on your dataset you may be better off creating tile packages for each file in your dataset. For example, one dataset I have covers strips of a country separated by several hundred miles (so there's a lot of white space between the data). In this case it's much more efficient storage wise to create separate packages for either each file, or for the two "strips". Numbers for context:

Map (all data + whitespace) = 102GB

Maps for each strip of data (6 total) = 45GB