Can You Create a Custom Mesh?

610
1
Jump to solution
10-25-2019 12:23 PM
RobBever
New Contributor III

I want to create a cone-like 3D shape that indicates a field of view, so it's got a horizontal and vertical degrees element, and the base should be convex, since it's based on a range from a point. The horizontal and vertical degrees values are customizable, so I can't just create a 3D model ahead of time.

It appears there's no way to define your own mesh other than to load an external file in one of a few formats. Maybe I could do that, but I also want to be able to deform the FOV cone shape in real time when something obstructs it. I don't expect anything in ESRI to perform the calculations, but it doesn't seem doable to be continuously creating custom mesh files programmatically and loading them from file multiple times per second.

Is there any solution for this problem? I've considered using a series of lines, but I want my cone to be translucent, so the colors of the lines will stack on top of each other and become much more opaque than I would like. I wanted a single mesh of a single color, but I currently can't see how this could be done.

What I want is a bit similar to the geometry calculations you can do with 2D shapes, for example to basically subtract one shape from another. I'm fine with doing the calculations myself but it doesn't seem like there's any way to do this at all.

If there's some ESRI feature that might work here that I'm not aware of, that would be very helpful. Thanks.

0 Kudos
1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
RobBever
New Contributor III

In case anyone finds this later, .dae and .ply files are relatively simple to create and work for this, though it's a bit of a hassle to do, and you have to actually load a file, you can't reference a URI that's internal to your application like you can in other cases.

However, it's still not a perfect solution, because the anchor points in pixel-size (i.e. constant size on the screen) mode are weird and don't work very consistently. They only work consistently in physical size mode, i.e. size in meters. So it's a solution, but not a complete one, until the anchoring is fixed up for models.

View solution in original post

0 Kudos
1 Reply
RobBever
New Contributor III

In case anyone finds this later, .dae and .ply files are relatively simple to create and work for this, though it's a bit of a hassle to do, and you have to actually load a file, you can't reference a URI that's internal to your application like you can in other cases.

However, it's still not a perfect solution, because the anchor points in pixel-size (i.e. constant size on the screen) mode are weird and don't work very consistently. They only work consistently in physical size mode, i.e. size in meters. So it's a solution, but not a complete one, until the anchoring is fixed up for models.

0 Kudos