TIN in a geodatabase

[stephanieduce]

Hi,
Is it possible to store TINs in a geodatabase?
I read that "Terrain" could be used to create TINs in a geodatabase but the tool is not highlighted in ArcCatalog for me.

Thanks for your help,
Steph

[RussellBrennan]

Hi Steph,

It is not possible to create TIN's in a geodatabase. Terrains are the recommended option for storing this type of data in a geodatabase.

The likely reason that the option to create a terrain is grayed out is because you have not turned on the extension.

Here are instructions for enabling the extension:
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/About_enabling_3D_Analyst/00q8000000rr...

Here is a link to some documentation on terrains:
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//005v00000002000000.htm

[stephanieduce]

Thank you Russell. Now Terrain is activated.
But what if I already have the TIN created? I simply want to store it in the geodatabase.
Steph

[RussellBrennan]

Steph,

If you still have the source data that you used to build the TIN you can use this to build a new terrain. If you only have the TIN you can 'deconstruct' it back to features using the TinNode tool to get the point data, the TinLine tool to extract breaklines, and the TinDomain tool if a clip polygon was used.

Russell

[michaelcollins1]

I created a TIN in a FGDB, only I cannot see it in the catalog window or ArcCatalog. The TIN displays on my map though.

[TI]

I have found that it will dutifully write the TIN to the folder that contains the fGDB (ie, the folder with the '.gdb' extension), but it is not actually part of the fGDB in the database sense.

It's rather dangerous behaviour, as nothing should ever touch those .gdb folders except ArcMap, as there is a danger of corrupting the database.  It's crazy that ArcMap will just write other files there, where it cannot later see them (from Catalog, or ArcMap).  It can read them initially, but you can't manually load them from there through ArcMap later.