Advice on Size of 3D Mesh Delivery?

[GBacon]

I'm working with a 3D mesh provider and have a few options for delivery to cover my county (~400 sq. miles). The standard option is for each .slpk to be 1 sq. mile, which seems too burdensome when it comes to publishing to ArcGIS Online. Even if automated, I want to avoid management of this many content items. The second option would be for me to specify my own grid size for tiling the files, while the third would be delivery of the entire county. 

I'm trying to get an estimate of the file size for the whole county, but wondered if it is reasonable to assume I can publish a 400 sq. mile 3D mesh to ArcGIS Online. Does anyone have experience with this? I've published a 300 GB LiDAR scene package but my experience with publishing 3D mesh packages has been over fairly small areas. Can I merge smaller files in ArcGIS Pro? I don't see any tools to do this but will keep searching.

Any assistance is appreciated.

[GordonSumerling]

Hello @GBacon. When dealing with .slpk Reality Mesh, it cannot be edited once created. Currently there is not a concept of Mosaic of Mesh eaither. Generally, it is recommended to have one Reality Mesh or as few as possible for an Epoch. Many tiles means that each will appear as a layer in your Table of Contents and as you mention management and organsition becomes tricky. Estimation of Reality Mesh size is dependant on resolution. The higher the resolution the greater the size of the .slpk

[VytautasGipiskis]

Hope catalog layer will be improved to handle scene layers (currently it supports only Scene layer packages).

[KurtSchwoppe]

Hi Greg - Gordon provides great advice.  I also want to get this in front of @SeanMorrish and @CodyBenkelman to get their feedback.  We are making major changes to the Catalog Layer capability, so maybe that will help.  It was my understanding that the Catalog Layer should work kind of like a Mosaic Dataset for SLPKs, but best to confirm with the experts

[GBacon]

Thanks, Kurt. I was just reading about catalog layers and their similarities to mosaic datasets. I look forward to their input. 

[GBacon]

@KurtSchwoppe @SeanMorrish @CodyBenkelman @GordonSumerling  We now have a very large 3D mesh of our county (900GB+) that I don't know what to do with as far as publishing for public use in ArcGIS Online. I'm going to meet with the vendor to see what other jurisdictions have done but wondered if any of you have input on this. I appreciate any assistance you can offer.

[GordonSumerling]

Hello @GBacon 

What you describe is a common problem that I do see. Your challenge is the best way to store and manage this data then serve this as a REST service.

Now 900GB in ArcGIS Online will not be overly expensive as this data format is monetarised at 1.2 Credits per GB per month. Which for a terabyte is 1200 credits per month or 14400 per year. In the scheme of things this is relatively cheap for storage.

If you have Image Dedicated or ArcGIS Enterprise then you can also store the SLPK as i3sREST format in cloud storage (AWS S3 or AZURE BLOB) and then create a scene service from that.

This blog is an excellent example of how this maybe achieved.

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgisrealitystudio/3d-gis/case-study-how-to-maintain-a-st...

[GBacon]

Thanks, Gordon. I was able to pubish the mesh from ArcGIS Pro using Share>>Web Scene rather than the Share Package tool I've used in the past. The data seems to be performing well in both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro scenes in which I load the scene layer from ArcGIS Online.