Visibility Analysis

This week, we worked through four Esri modules on Visibility Analysis. Here's a few observations, tips, and tricks I learned:

You can created some pretty advanced 3D landscapes in ArcGIS, with control over the textures and imagery. You can even set the sun to cast shadows as it would during a certain time of day in the global view!

It's important to consider where to set the ground surface when working in 3D scenes. Do you want the height based from the ground itself, the relationship to the ground, or an arbitrary point?

You can map things under the ground surface. Mind boggling and super important as an archaeologist!

You must first make the lines before conducting the line of site analysis. ArcGIS will color code the lines for you and it's easy to select out and delete lines that do not have intervisibility.

The viewshed analysis tools are pretty extensive and can be used for a lot of different things. I didn't realize you would end up with a raster depicting what is visible. To have this make a little more sense, especially when thinking about topography impact on viewsheds, you can drape the raster across a terrain in a 3D scene.

You can easily convert 2D layers and data to 3D layers and data in several different ways. The 2D features can be extruded to make them into 3D features.