Editing planar 3D polygons

MichaelBishopp · ‎10-04-2016

I am trying to edit a bunch of intersecting 3D planar polygons so that I get the minimum surface between all of the intersecting planes. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make it work. Is there any advice or training I can take to get this job done. Below is an image of two of the many planar features that I need to edit. The blue planes intersect the green planes at the left of the image. The intersecting blue plane above the green plane needs to be deleted.

I have tried 3d editing in ArcScene using INTERSECT (both with polygons and multipatches)...this doesn't seem to work. I have tried using Union to try to split the polygons at intersections...this has not worked. I am not sure where to go after trying these methods.

Any advice out there?

MichaelBishopp · ‎10-04-2016

I have even tried to get the minimum surface using raster processing. This works, but does not give me a very accurate surface based on the resolution of the raster cells (I used 1 ft cells). When I went down to 0.5 ft cells, the resultant raster used in the calculations was over 3 GB big. This was totally unwieldy and I couldn't make it work. Plus, I want to get the features into ArcGIS online (porting the features to the ArcGIS.com cloud). Since porting a raster that is over 3 GB big is not reasonable, I figured I could convert the raster to a polygon...but this was unwieldy too because I would have to go RASTER --> TIN, and then TIN --> polygon. This would create a polygon feature class that is WAY TOO BIG to go into the cloud...so that left me with what seems like the only option of trying to edit the polygon or multipatch features in ArcScene.