You may encounter the following issues when working with scenes, hosted scene layers, or 3D data in the portal website. Possible solutions to these common issues are proposed.
Scene viewer
Hosted scene layers
- Publishing a hosted scene layer takes a long time.
- My hosted scene layer does not draw when I add it to the scene viewer or ArcGIS Pro.
- The colors or textures on my multipatch features appear to flicker or continuously switch colors.
- The buildings in my hosted scene layer are not draped correctly over the elevation surface; for example, they appear to float above the ground or to be partially buried.
Scene cache management
Scene viewer
Some devices automatically switch between integrated graphics and dedicated graphics cards to render 3D graphics. The scene viewer (and scene-based apps) work best with a dedicated graphics card; therefore, in your graphics card driver settings, make sure the per-application settings for your web browser are set to the dedicated graphics card. 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.
- 3D-enabled layers—This includes 3D data with z-values and 2D data that has an Elevation mode of Relative to ground or Absolute height.
- Next, the scene viewer displays dynamic map services and 2D feature layers with an Elevation mode of On the ground.
- Finally, the scene viewer displays hosted tile layers and cached map services.
For example, a dynamic layer of hurricanes always displays on top of a cached map service (tile layer) of population density even if the hurricane layer is at the bottom of Contents.
Hosted scene layers
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 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.
The most likely cause for this is the scene cache did not build. If you attempt to add the scene layer to the scene viewer or ArcGIS Pro before the cache finishes building, the layer will not draw. The time it takes to build the cache varies depending on how much data you have.
There are also scenarios when the cache cannot be built. For example, if your hosting server runs on machines with a Windows Server 2016 operating system, the system administrator needs to enable SSL 3.0 in the Internet Explorer options on each hosting server machine. See this Esri technical article 000016013 for more information.
The buildings in my hosted scene layer are not draped correctly over the elevation surface; for example, they appear to float above the ground or to be partially buried.
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.
Scene cache management
As mentioned in Tasks to perform after you create a data store and Manage data store backups, ArcGIS Data Store should be configured to output backup files to a machine separate from the ArcGIS Data Store installation. If the ArcGIS Data Store administrator did not do this and you find your hosted scene layer tile caches take too much room on the ArcGIS Data Store tile cache data store machine, change the scene tile cache location to a shared location on a separate server. The ArcGIS Data Store administrator can 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.
The backup size grows with the amount of data you have in your layers and the number of hosted layers you publish. If you find you are running out of disk space on your backup machine, the ArcGIS Data Store administrator should adjust backup frequency, retention times, or both.
Note that tile caches for individual scene layers do not change. If you infrequently publish hosted scene layers, the ArcGIS Data Store administrator can disable automatic backups and manually create backups of only the relational data store. Use the updatebackupschedule utility to stop the automatic creation of backups, and use the backupdatastore utility to manually create full backups of the relational and tile cache data stores.