Edit river polyline to conform to hexagon borders

[FORESTWEBB]

Is there a way to get a polyline representing a river to conform to the nearest side of a hexagon in a hexagonal grid? Short of manually snapping each vertex on the river polyline to the nearest hexagon vertex is there a tool that will do this for all of the river vertices within a given map extent automatically?

[jcarlson · Accepted solution]

There is a Snap geoprocessing tool that may do what you're looking for. If you're careful about how you set the snap environment, you can probably get it. Just be sure to either toggle the setting to Allow Undo of the tool's edits, or else do it to a throwaway copy of the layer.

[FORESTWEBB]

Thanks. That is what I gathered. Just had to make sure I had downloaded the actual dataset for the rivers rather than use the image service layer through ESRI. 

[DanPatterson]

If you go the snap route, make sure you densify your polylines, otherwise they will lack the necessary point density to accomplish what you wish

Densify (Editing)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

You will probably have to perform some editing in any event since densification can provide too many snapping points in some locations, necessitating you remove duplicate points after all is done.

[FORESTWEBB]

That will be the challenging part....too many vertices and there will be an excess of minor editing and too few and you lose the semblance of where the river roughly flows. I've decided on a medium of roughly 1/2 the distance between vertices of a single hexside...for the Simplification  Tolerence  between vertices.