Here is another common question that our Support staff often get questions about.  So they decided to write a blog about the possible issues that might arise.

Click here to read the Support Blog about why your Georeferencing Toolbar might be grayed out.

Here are a few more Support Blog Posts regarding georeferencing:
Working with Rasters: Georeferencing
Having problems georeferencing your raster image?

Fire up CityEngine and drag ‘n drop the Results.gdb from the CityEngine: Philadelphia example into a new scene. Select the building footprint feature classes and hit Finish.

“Click on the images for full-res versions”

Create a new rule in your rules folder. Right-click on the folder and go ‘new->CGA Rule File’. CityEngine creates the CGA file and opens the rule file in the visual editor. Make sure you set it to showing visual as well as textual.

Now let’s just simply extrude our building. Add the following lines to your CGA file, save (ctrl S), select a footprint, drag ‘n drop the rule file on it and hit Generate (ctrl G in viewport).

Our start rule is called Footprint and in this rule we are extruding the start shape (selected footprint) randomly between minHeight and maxHeight and call the result MassModel. Next we are going to split the MassModel into Facades and the Roof so we can do different things to it.

The MassModel rule colors the building red and splits it into components (side and top) which get the Facades and Roof rules. Next we are going to split the Facades into floors using the Facades rule and add a roof with the Roof rule.

The Facades are split approx. every 3 meters into floors (-> Floor rule) and the roof will be a gable roof with 30 degree angle, 2 meter overhangs and a yellow color.

We can add 3D windows to the floors by splitting the floor and inserting a 3D model of a window.

The floors are split horizontally approx. every 2 meters into windows (-> Window rule) and at every window location, we are inserting a 3D model of a window loaded from our CityEngine assets.

Very nice as Mr. Shephard would say. To finish off, let’s have a quick look at texturing the building instead of giving it a color and inserting 3D windows.

We have added a new variable called ‘Show_Textures and if this is set to true,  we’ll color the building white, setup a texture projection and add the texture from the assets folder to the facades in the Facades rule. Similarly we can do this for the roofs in the Roof rule.

And….. we’re done! Say hello to your first procedural building.

Now you might think, why do this procedurally? Why not use a traditionally 3D modeling package? Well… the benefit from procedural modeling becomes apparent when you need to create a lot of 3D buildings that need to have variation.

Select all buildings in your viewport and drag ‘n drop the HelloBuilding rule file on the selection. CityEngine creates a 3D building for each footprint according to the default variable settings.

Now using the Inspector (Window -> Inspector), you can dynamically change the 3D building models. Each variable (attr) we created in the rule file is automatically exposed in the Inspector window and can be modified interactively. This is extremely powerful. Have a go at changing the settings in the Inspector window and see how the 3D city is updated immediately.

Of course, this is a very simple rule file which only shows a fraction of what you can do with CityEngine. Next we will explore how you can use GIS attributes to drive the CityEngine parameter values allowing you to generate 3D buildings based on your GIS footprints using attributes such as ridge height and roof form.

You can find the rules and assets used in this post on ArcGIS.com.

Gert van Maren
Product Manager 3D

On July 21st Esri’s Team Water/Wastewater Meeting will be taking place in San Diego, CA.  This meeting is open to all who are interested in water, wastewater and stormwater GIS.  The agenda can be found on the Team Water/Wastewater web page. For registration and additional information contact Christa Campbell.

Don’t miss out on a full day of presentations by water industry professionals, Esri partners and Esri staff. We will be discussing redistricting, asset maintenance, ArcGIS Online for Organizations and much more!

The Department of Public Works of Marin County, CA (just north of San Francisco, CA) launched a watershed program to integrate flood protection, stream and wetland habitat restoration activities, fish passage, and water quality improvements. Instead of looking at flooding issues on a site by site basis, we solve flooding problems at a watershed scale, and employ solutions such as habitat restoration to reduce flood risks.

From the outset, we decided to base our stakeholder outreach, collection of scientific studies and technical reports, and dissemination of information from the Marin County Watershed Program website (http://www.marinwatersheds.org) in order to save paper resources, be more user-friendly, support community outreach and more efficiently advertise our updates than is possible with more traditional printed reports and documents.

Our website is the major repository of meeting notices, posted reports, and maps. Our website designer, Athena Design, chose a color palette to enhance and reflect the colors of nature: the blues of water, the greens of plants, and browns for earth tones; orange splashes complement the dominant blue. We use the palette extensively in producing the watershed maps, as well as for printed materials and PowerPoint presentations for a unified design.

Watershed Explorer

The Watershed Explorer page is the entry point for learning about existing conditions in each watershed in the county. The page features a watershed map with a hover function created in Adobe Flash, which pops up a watershed-specific photo and text snippet when you hover over a watershed on the map.  Clicking on the watershed itself leads to informational pages about that watershed, with thematic maps and local information about the natural flora and fauna, cultural history, and land use. We want residents of the watershed, students, and others to use these pages to discover new facts about where they live.

Flood Protection and Watershed Programs

Currently, we have six active Flood Protection and Watershed Programs, each of which has its own page on the website. Each program is a collaboration of local jurisdictions, water agencies, parks and open space districts, friends of creeks groups, and other interested and invested citizens and stakeholders. These programs, which are just getting under way, will include hydrology and hydraulic studies, stormwater master plans, potential impacts of sea-level rise, habitat assessments, and infrastructure inventory and capital improvement planning. These studies and plans will be posted to the website for citizen and stakeholder review and will lead to the identification of multi-benefit projects that can better compete for State and Federal funding.

GIS and geospatial data will play a central role in the analyses and mapping. While some of the H & H studies will be conducted by consultants using proprietary software, others may be done in house using HEC-GeoRAS and HEC-GeoHMS.  We are using recently-flown LiDAR data to create DEMs and DTMs for model inputs.

Our projects will need to be resilient to sea level rise. We are looking at various sea level rise scenarios (efforts by USGS, SF Bay Conservation and Development Commission, PRBO Conservation Science, etc.) and the possible effects on flood control facilities and sensitive species’ habitats.

Program Status and Next Steps

To date, summaries of existing conditions and lists of historic reports and studies have been completed. H & H studies and DEM development are complete or underway in four of the watersheds. Stakeholder groups have begun meeting. Some of the programs are more involved than others; some will be complete by the end of 2012, while others will continue through 2015 (not including project implemention).

The website continues to develop as our watershed work progresses. Some of our longer term options to improve the website include:

• Creating interactive maps to highlight facilities, project locations, and species presence
• Posting interactive hydrology and hydraulic models as they are developed
• Incorporating ArcServer-based mobile apps for field staff

Special thanks to Laurie Williams for providing this post. Questions for Laurie: lwilliams@marincounty.org

Problem:

Esri Technical Marketing maintains an Amazon cloud based, load balanced, scalable, application server that hosts web mapping applications. These apps require high amounts of revision due to the nature of the type of applications we generally work on.  Many of our apps are built to provide information about emergency situations.  These apps are released very soon after the emergency, allowing for little testing beforehand. Between the bugs inherent in fast development and the changing nature of the emergency situations, the apps experience a lot of iteration. 

Updating these apps with traditional methods would require updating the staging instance, generating an AMI, and then launching new instances to replace the existing live instances: a tedious and time consuming task.  Another option would be to manually update each machine individually, but this can lead to human error on live machines.  In a load balanced environment like we use, this results in different experiences for users and it can be difficult to determine which machine is the cause of the problem. These solutions are not practical for our release cycle, which often consists of several changes per week or even per day.  We needed a way of updating multiple live instances seamlessly, while maintaining the ability to scale our servers as demand increases.

Solution:

To address this challenge we decided to store our application code using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), then transfer this code automatically to our live servers.  Because our application servers were already deployed in Amazon EC2, it made sense to continue to use Amazon’s technology. We’ve also found that Amazon S3 is a relatively inexpensive solution for small amounts of data.

While S3 is capable of hosting simple web applications entirely within its framework, our applications often require functionality it does not provide.  Consequently, we just treat S3 as a repository for our most current application code.  We synchronize our local updates with our repository in S3, ensuring that our code base contains the most up-to-date code available. 

We’ve also configured our live servers to periodically request updates from S3. We do this through a free Python-based tool called S3cmd provided by the good folks at S3tools.org.  I can actually run this tool locally to automatically send new or updated files to S3, or I can run it on the live instances to download any updates that S3 may have received. 

Implementation and script:

The implementation of this process is fairly straightforward.  Within our local file server we set up a folder for staging applications and a second folder for live applications.  Within these folders, each application has its own folder. We then have a scheduled task run every 1 minute to check if there are changes to anything contained in the staging folder or the live folder.

If changes are detected, we then run the command to sync to the S3 bucket in the cloud.  Having the script check the file system cuts down on traffic to the S3 bucket to determine if changes were made, and it also cuts down on transfer costs with Amazon.

Meanwhile, the application servers also have scheduled tasks that run every 5 minutes to check the S3 bucket for updates.  Because we cannot tell locally if there are any changes to be made to the files, we increased the duration between executions of the scheduled task to cut down on traffic to Amazon.

We built a Python script that can do either of these tasks as well as log any errors that may come up.  It’s available for you to download here.

Contributed by David McGuire of the Esri Technical Marketing team

This well count aggregation web map shows how a complex data source, such as gas wells in a producing field, can be aggregated and portrayed in an easy-to-understand manner.  This was designed as an ArcGIS Online web map to show the aggregation number as a proportional symbol of wells per administrative area.  In this case, three levels of aggregation were used based on the most logical administrative areas:  parishes, Public Land Survey System (PLSS) townships, and PLSS sections.

This web map was created to serve as a proof of concept to show the aggregation of point symbols by area.  It can be extended to many other situations, depending on need.  To take full advantage of this particular web map, it should be used as part of a dashboard viewer where it can be combined with return-on-investment data to allow executives to make informed decisions.

Well Count Aggregation Web Map

Two new map templates are now available in ArcGIS Online. Both support creating services and web maps that feature historic preservation and conservation content.  You can find these templates in Historic Conservation and Preservation ArcGIS Resources Group in ArcGIS Online.

The Historic Buildings & Districts Conservation and Preservation Web Map template is an ArcMap editing map, a set of editing workflows for creating and managing historical information about buildings, and a set of ArcMap documents for serving historical building information in a Web Map.

The Scanned Map Services for Historic Conservation & Preservation template is an ArcMap editing map, and a set of georeferencing workflows for creating mosaic datasets and image services from a set of scanned historical maps.

Figure 1 and 2 are examples of what can be created with each of these templates.

Figure 1. This example shows the historical buildings and a web map pop-up that describes the building, whether it is designated/protected and provides a link to documentation that may be available.

Figure 2. This example shows an excerpt of a scanned Sanborn map, providing detailed information about buildings that existed at some point in time.

If you are interested in this topic, please comment on this post or join the ArcGIS Online group.

The default projection for all basemaps in ArcGIS Online is Web Mercator.  In a previous blog entry, Bern Szukalski explained using custom basemaps as an alternative to Web Mercator and the ArcGIS Resource Center provides information on how to build online basemaps.  Mercator projections are very useful for certain mapping tasks but not so good for others because they dramatically exaggerate northern and southern latitudes.  This exaggeration deforms the shape and size of areas.  Whilst Web Mercator has become a widely adopted web mapping standard (because of the tiling system being well suited to this spatial reference), there are situations where you may want a different map projection. In thematic mapping, for instance, you might want to preserve areas or shapes or even use a more pleasing view of the world than Web Mercator provides at small scales.   This blog entry describes how you can switch out the default basemap for your own, simplified thematic basemap.

When you open the ArcGIS.com map viewer the default terrain with labels basemap appears in Web Mercator (figure 1).

Figure 1. Default terrain with labels basemap in ArcGIS.com map viewer

There are a couple of different ways to switch out the basemap.  One option is to click Add and then select Add layer from Web. If you know the URL of the service that you want to use (perhaps you have hosted an alternative basemap on a Server) then enter it into the dialog box and check Use as Basemap (figure 2).

Figure 2. Add layer from Web

Alternatively, you can search for services in ArcGIS Online by selecting the Search for Layers option (figure 3) and then entering your search term.  Once you have located the service you are interested in, click on its name and then select Use as Basemap (figure 4).

Figure 3. Search for Layers

Figure 4. Using an ArcGIS Online service as a basemap

The default Web Mercator basemap will be replaced by your new basemap.  Once the new basemap is added to the map viewer, any new layers you add are re-projected on-the-fly to the new basemap.

For thematic mapping, the Esri Light Gray Canvas map provides a neutral background for operational overlay information.  In this example, we built a generalized world map in a similar style in ArcGIS for Desktop but projected it using the Robinson projection.  This compromise projection is neither equal area nor conformal but gives a good overall view of the whole globe.  We then published a cached map service at a range of small scales suitable for global and continental scale web maps and used it to build a web map version of the famous English Coal Exports in 1894 map by Charles Joseph Minard (figure 5).

Figure 5. English Coal Exports in 1894 presented using a Robinson projection in ArcGIS.com map viewer

You can view the web map by clicking the image above or going to English Coal Exports in 1894. You can also use the Robinson projection basemap service in your own web map.

Sample Range Card

This Esri Defense template simplifies the process of creating a set of range cards for a position. The template allows you to create range fans based on weapon characteristics and placement, and then lets you generate a set of standard range cards for each weapon at the position.  The template includes a variety of point features to represent reference points, target reference points, trees, and structures.  It also includes line features to represent limit lines, walls, fences, and ditches, and area features to represent range fans.The template tools create index features for each range fan feature, and the ArcGIS Data Driven Pages tool automates the production of layouts for each range card.