TIN surface handling best practices

[JamesMaeding]

I come from the land of autocad/bricscad, and have used several tools to make tin surfaces. My company even made their own set of tools because we do not like how civil3d shares stuff. We have used Infraworks since its birth, and I am experienced at formatting surface data as tin, grid, point cloud if desired.

My recent quest is to use ArcGIS Pro to make 3d scenes, and then share with the Online product. I did a few tests, and quickly realized that Pro is not great at dealing with tin's of a couple million tris. I am on a fast machine, hardware is not the issue.

In Infraworks, we typically have three surfaces - usgs dem for way outside the project, an existing ground tin from flown topo for the site, and a proposed ground tin for roads and subdivision we are designing.

It can be a lot as we do master planned developments.

Knowing that I am going to push Pro in this manner, can anyone recommend the most efficient way of formatting the tins?

I am a bit new to how ESRI software does things, and am guessing there is some way of feeding Pro just what it needs for a given view angle and zoom factor. School me please

[JamesMaeding]

After doing more testing, I am getting good results by waiting a while for the scene to "rebuild" after I add the tin as a surface source. This was a 1 million or so tris (how do I know for sure? not listed anywhere).

The interesting thing is I did not put any clip boundaries on my surface, yet it seems to be allowing the default existing surface through at the edges. I wish I could view the wireframe of the composite tin surface somehow.

Boy, it takes a long time for things to regen when I check a data source on or off. So while waiting does give a nice 3d model I can orbit quickly, I still wonder if I should be using something like a point cloud for surface points as I read that was possible.

[JamesMaeding]

wow, crickets. Am I to believe ArcGIS Pro just cannot handle a decent sized tin surface?

I've had no problems building the tins, even large ones, but the 3d scene in Pro seems like it wants simple, sparse, gridded DEM type data. That is horrible for showing streets with curbs or walls.