Generating Realistic 3D Buildings

[JenAmes]

I've been working on a project building a 3D version of the municipality I work for. Nothing too complicated yet, mostly just points (trees, street signs, park benches), but I've been running into some issues with generating 3D buildings. I am familiar with the Local Government 3D Basemaps solution, but it's difficult to follow, and data has to be set up a certain way ahead of time for it to work. I started using the Extract Roof Forms for Municipal Government solution to generate realistic roof forms, because the 3D Basemaps requires building files to have eave height and roof type, but each time I try to run the tool, I receive an error message, most commonly that an ObjectID field does not exist, which it most definitely does.  

We recently had imagery done for our municipality, so I have DTM, DSM and point cloud data already, and generated a nDSM from the data we have. I have a building footprint shapefile (with ObjectID fields). As I stated, I read through and followed the steps for the lessons listed above, and am receiving multiple errors along the way that don't allow me to create the realistic 3D buildings I'm looking for. Why would I be receiving these errors? Is following the steps from these lessons with my own data not going to give me the same output? How can I essentially drape imagery over 3D buildings to create those realistic looking buildings if these lessons are not going to give me the steps I should follow?

Thank you!

[ArthurCrawford]

Hello Jen,

I create a new featureclass in a Geodatabase with the attributes of the old one and then load the buildings into it, shapefile might be the problem.   I had a problem like this because I had run processes (joins) on the data and the ObjectID field was actually named something like ObjectID_1.  There can be also an issue if one of your field names matches the names of the intermediate fields generated.  If you are still having an issue, delete all the fields and run it to see if this is the problem.  I would also reproject your data to the same projection as the DTM/DSM/nDSM.  

Arthur Crawford - Esri Content Team

[JenAmes]

Arthur Crawford‌ I just tried what you suggested. Made sure everything was in the same coordinate system, loaded the data from my shapefile into a new feature class in a new geodatabase. I'm still receiving the same error. Am I misunderstanding this error? I'm assuming it means no OBJECTID field in the buildings layer, but could it be referencing something else?

As a next step, are you suggesting to delete ALL of the fields in the Buildings layer? Or all but one field? 

I'm just getting quite frustrated because it crashes at the same point in the process every time, and as you can see from my screenshot, takes around half an hour before failing. That's a long time to sit around, just for it to fail. Repeatedly.

[DanielHedges]

Hi Jen,

Thanks for asking this, I apologize for the frustration. Yes, it could be a separate issue with the data that is causing this (not ObjectID missing). You don't need to delete all your fields. Could you test on a small area of your data and make sure it still fails? If it does, could you send that small sample area via email to dhedges at esri dot com so I can reproduce? It is difficult to understand the issue without looking at the data, so this is the likely the easiest way.

In regards to your texturing question, we have the ability to apply procedural (synthetic) textures to buildings, but applying aerial imagery directly to 3D buildings does not work very well, as it does not include imagery for facades. If you have oblique imagery for certain buildings, you can apply these manually to the multipatch buildings after they are created.

Hope this helps!

Dan Hedges - 3D Product Engineer

[JenAmes]

Daniel Hedges‌,

I tried it out with less than 200 features compared to all of the buildings in the Borough (over 5000), and still had the same error message of OBJECTID does not exist. I will send you the clipped polygon and raster fields. 

Thank you for clarifying the procedural texture for me. I was under the impression that the way I described it was possible. 

Thank you for your help! I'll be reaching out to you shortly!

Jen

[LeoLadefian2]

Why don't you generate LOD2 buildings (schematic), you don't need and building info just LiDAR data.

[JenAmes]

The problem is I don't have high enough resolution lidar data to do this. So I can't generate any LOD buildings because the cell size is too big.