I’ve been diving into ArcGIS Pro/ArcGIS Online lately, and here’s a quick way to produce a 3D web scene from publicly available data (final example: here). You do need an ArcGIS Online Organizational account with permission to publish in order to follow along.
- Find your data. In my case, I used a point feature class representing city trees, provided by the City of Prince George, through their Open Data Catalogue (layer here).
- In ArcGIS Pro, start a new local scene project and add the trees as a preset layer (Map -> Add Preset -> Realistic trees. Convenient!). Customize the preset symbology to use GenusName as the type, TreeHeight as the height, proportional as the crown width, and meters as the unit.
- Eventually, we need to share the trees as a web feature layer. Unfortunately, web feature layers are limited to 2000 features (there are 3928 trees in the dataset), so we need to split it up. You can do that by making a copy of the feature layer (copy/paste), and setting a definition query for each one (e.g. FID is Less Than 2000/FID is Greater Than or Equal to 2000).
- It’s time to share the web scene – Share -> Share As -> Web Scene.
- Fill out the web scene metadata (e.g. name, summary, tags, etc.).
- Click Analyze to make sure all is well, and troubleshoot the problems as necessary. You may need to change the scene coordinate reference system to match the layers.
- Click Share and the web scene should be uploaded to your ArcGIS organizational account. Make sure you share with everyone if this is meant to be a public scene.
- In a browser, log into your ArcGIS organizational account. You should see a web scene, hosted feature layer, and service definition. You can customize the web scene if you’d like.
- Click on the web scene item. Click Create Web App -> Using a Template. I used the simple scene viewer template. The rest takes you through some configuration steps, but they isn’t a whole lot to configure with this template.
- That’s it! You can see my example here: https://edynamics.maps.arcgis.com/apps/3DScene/index.html?appid=e596fa17a01f4a30ab0d7829031ba6f2