Scene Viewer New Functionality- How to Edit to Upload 3D models in Web Scene?

[Amanda__Huber]

Hello Scene Viewer Team, 

We're very excited for the new capability to upload 3D Models into the scene viewer. We have lots of OBJ files and are excited to test it out. 

I watched your video tutorial in the the ArcGIS Online June 2023 Update announcement but it's uncear how you got to this setting/functionality: 
https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/arcgis-online/3d-gis/whats-new-in-scene-viewer-june-2023/ 

It seems you need to have an editable scene layer to start(?) 

When we try to create a scene layer from AGOL > Create Item> Scene layer it appears OBJ files aren't supported: 

That being said, we're trying to understand how to get started/set up a layer like to to add our OBJ files too. (Apologies if this is an obvious answer, we're just dabbling into the world of 3D GIS now)

Thanks in advance!

Amanda Huber

[Ed_]

So let's say I want to bring a 3D asset from CityEngine to ultimately Scene Viewer. Is the process same for bringing over assets from CityEngine to ArcGIS Pro 3.1 that you mentioned under `Prepare data using latest ArcGIS Pro 3.1`? 

[VeronikaLanders]

Hi Saadullah,

could you share this in a bit more detail through a direct message? I'm not sure I understand what exactly you would like to do but generally, the process for supported 3D models that you have stored on disk is the same (independent of the source software).

Thanks,
Veronika

[JamesFindlay]

Hi @VeronikaLanders,

I've followed the steps as you described, but I still don't have the option to create new features from Scene Viewer--only edit the attributes for existing features. Is this still the correct workflow for 2024? I am using Pro 3.3.1 and the latest version of ArcGIS Online.

Sincerely,

James

[DanielFox1]

Hi @VeronikaLanders 

We had a case that surrounds this issue and this workflow above was noted as a workaround. The issue was to do with using Web Mercator for publishing a 3D layer from ArcGIS Pro, here is the workflow 

Steps to Reproduce:

1. In ArcGIS Pro, create a new 3D object feature class and set the coordinate system to Web Mercator
2. Add the 3D object feature class to a local scene in Web Mercator
3. Use Add 3D Formats to Multipatch to enable the GLB format on the layer. This is required for web editing
4. Optionally import a 3D object using Import 3D Objects tool
5. Share the 3D object feature layer by right clicking on it > Sharing > Share as Web Layer
6. In the sharing config, enable editing, choose the option to cache online and make sure the option to publish a related feature layer is enabled
7. Start the sharing job
8. The job will fail after a few minutes. A service definition, feature layer and scene layer will be created in AGOL, but the scene layer won't open. Rebuilding the scene layer cache will not fix it

We have since logged a defect (BUG-000171140) against this but I would appreciate your comments on this matter or do you know if this is expected?

[kristian_inCitu]

Hi, this is a great feature 👏. Is there any plan to support the 3d model upload in API?
Thanks, 
Krisztian

[VeronikaLanders]

Hi Kristian,

actually 🙂 not just a plan - we released it also as a beta for the Maps SDK for JavaScript.

You can find more information in our SDK Release Notes and please feel free to reach out with your more specific questions, ideas and thoughts also through direct messages to our developer evangelist @ArnoFiva or me. Please keep in mind that this is a beta feature where documentation has room for improvement, we might still change public API and you may encounter some unexpected issues.

Thanks and looking forward,
Veronika

[kristian_inCitu]

Hi Veronika,

Thank you so much for the update! I'm excited to hear that the new feature is available in Maps SDK for JavaScript. Starting to explore it and hopefully provide some positive feedback. 😀

Best, 
Krisztian

[BernardRIXEN]

I tested this great idea ! It's a lot easer to update/upload 3D models.

I made it work with a dataset in wgs84 in a globale scene. Does it also work within a local scene and other coordinate systems ?

I tried to upload quite big files (>100MB), which are not uncommon, and they failed to load. Are there known limitations (max file size, max number of faces, possible unsupported features like material...) ?

By the way, when loading, a model was lying on its side. We're now able to turn it in the horizontal plane. It would be great to be able to do it in the other planes too.

Best, Bernard

[VeronikaLanders]

Hi Bernard,

it is also supported in local scenes for projected coordinate systems. Depending what you would like to do, a local scene is actually the best path during the beta phase as we are aware of some issues with geographical coordinate systems in our beta release.

For larger or more complex models we would be happy if you could share those with us together with their use cases - we are currently evaluating the technical and user experience limits of what we can fully support in terms of size and complexity on the web when moving out of beta while not limiting our users arbitrarily based on file size only.

I would love to hear more about your use case, especially around your requirement for switching planes. Please feel free to send me a direct message to continue this conversation or if you happen to go to the User Conference I'm sure @ArnoFiva will be happy to meet with you.

Best,
Veronika

[JoeEastman1]

For those of us without Pro, we are kind of stuck and not able to use this new functionality. The process for getting a 3D Object enabled feature class out of Pro seems straight forward. But without that .zip file of the FGDB those without Pro are helpless.

Because the process of creating a blank 3D Object enabled feature class is so trivial, it seems that at the least perhaps Esri could share a sample .zip file of the FGDB with everything we need to upload to AGOL. Then we could publish the scene layer no problem and start using this functionality. Is it possible to get a very simple file we can use to upload and get started? I've scoured the internet for something like this but came up empty handed.