Some systems can automatically switch between integrated graphics and dedicated graphics cards to render 3D graphics. The scene viewer works best with a dedicated graphics card; therefore, assign your graphics card driver to the web browser you use to open the scene viewer. How you configure per-application settings for your graphics card will vary depending on the type and version of graphics card driver you use.

If you see benching (a step-like appearance of the elevation surface) in your elevation layer created from a cached elevation image service, you may need to lower the compression value and maximum error of the service when you publish to better match the resolution of the elevation data. You can configure these settings from ArcGIS 10.3 for Desktop or later.

The scene viewer has a built-in hierarchy for ordering layers. The viewer displays your layers in the order listed below. Within each of these groups, you can order the layers in the scene.

1. 3D-enabled layers, such as 3D data with z-values and 2D data that has an Elevation mode of Relative to ground or Absolute height
2. Dynamic map services and 2D feature layers with an Elevation mode of On the ground
3. Hosted tile layers and cached map service

For example, a dynamic layer of U.S. hurricanes always displays on top of a tile layer or cached map service of U.S. population density even if the hurricane layer is at the bottom of Contents.

The scene viewer can display a maximum of 2,000 points, lines, or polygons. If you need to view the features in the scene viewer, publish subsets of data totaling fewer than 2,000 features.

When you publish a web scene layer that contains more than one multipatch layer from ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Pro returns a message stating the scene cache was successfully generated even though only the first multipatch layer's cache is built. If you immediately try to open the scene layer in the scene viewer and all caches are not generated, you see the error Root node is not available for layer and the layer cannot be displayed. Allow more time for the multipatch layer's cache to be built before trying to open the web scene layer.

This occurs if your multipatch data contains mixed vertex ordering and incorrect normals. Ensure the data is authored correctly and does not contain these.

This happens if you defined colors and textures for the z-values of both exterior and interior surfaces in your multipatch data. Be sure the data does not have different colors and textures defined for exterior and interior surfaces.

You must use absolute elevation values from the geometries' z-values when publishing multipatch data. To correct this, use the Layer 3D to Feature Class geoprocessing tool in ArcMap to create a new multipatch feature class that uses an absolute height and republish the scene layer from the new multipatch data.

The data used for hosted scene layers is large and complex; it can take a long time to publish and create caches for this data. If you find publishing scenes to your portal takes longer than the maximum usage time set on the portal's hosting server, increase the maximum usage time value. The default time is 60 minutes.

ArcGIS Data Store backups include the managed database and all scene layer cache databases. As mentioned in Tasks to perform after you create a data store and Manage data store backups, you should output backup files to a machine separate from your ArcGIS Data Store installation. The backup size grows with the amount of data you have in your layers and the number of hosted feature and scene layers you publish. If you find you are running out of disk space on your ArcGIS Data Store backup machine, adjust backup frequency, retention times, or both.

Note that scene cache databases do not change. If you infrequently publish hosted scene layers, you can disable automatic backups and manually create backups of only the managed database. Use the updatebackupschedule utility to stop the automatic creation of full and incremental backups, and use the backupdatastore utility to manually create full backups of the hosted feature layer data store. Be aware, though, that disabling automatic backups means you can no longer recover your hosted feature layer data store to a specific point in time.

If you find your hosted scene layer tile caches take too much room on your ArcGIS Data Store machine, change the scene tile cache location to a shared location on a separate server. Use the changenosqldatalocation utility to designate a shared directory. Hosted scene layers published after you change the output directory will store their caches in the new location.