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
- Point symbols and labels do not appear in the scene.
- My elevation layer doesn’t display correctly in the scene.
- My scene does not display layers in the same order as shown in the Contents pane.
- My layers aren't supported in Scene Viewer.
- My layer is only partially drawn.
- Neither my gamepad nor SpaceMouse device navigates in Scene Viewer.
Hosted scene layers
- Publishing a hosted scene layer takes a long time and the process times out before completion.
- When publishing a hosted scene layer, I receive a message that the portal token expired and publishing fails.
- I receive error 001887: Failed to create couchdb database when publishing a hosted scene layer.
- 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. 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.
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 Elevation mode set to Relative to ground or Absolute height.
- Next, Scene Viewer displays dynamic map services and 2D feature layers with Elevation mode set to On the ground.
- Finally, 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.
Often layers are released in ArcGIS Online before ArcGIS Enterprise. Here are Scene Viewer layer types with release information for ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online.
| Layer | ArcGIS Enterprise version | ArcGIS Online release |
|---|---|---|
Scene layer: building | 10.7 | December 2018 |
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) | 10.6 | September 2017 |
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) | 10.5.1 | December 2016 |
Scene layer: point cloud | 10.5.1 | December 2016 |
Vector tile layer | 10.5.1 | December 2016 |
Scene layer: integrated mesh | 10.5 | June 2016 |
Scene layer: point | 10.4 | November 2015 |
Scene layer: 3D object | 10.3.1 | March 2015 |
Elevation layer | 10.3.1 | March 2015 |
Feature layer | 10.3.1 | March 2015 |
Imagery layer | 10.3.1 | March 2015 |
Map Image layer | 10.3.1 | March 2015 |
Tile layer | 10.3.1 | March 2015 |
A layer may have too many features for Scene Viewer to display at one time due to performance reasons. When this occurs, a message appears in Scene Viewer warning that the layer is only partially drawn. To see the omitted features, zoom in and move around the scene.
3D symbology affects the number of features shown. Also, changing to complex 3D symbols, such as from cubes to trees, can cause fewer features to be drawn since trees require more vertices to be rendered.
Scene Viewer supports navigation for most gamepads and 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse devices. Support for navigation with devices other than a standard mouse depends on the operating system, browser, and device. The following are the supported devices by operating system and browser:
Windows
- Chrome—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4); 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse
- Firefox—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One)
- Edge—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One)
macOS
- Chrome—Gamepad (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 4); 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse
Note:
- The Safari browser doesn't support gamepad or 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse navigation in Scene Viewer.
- You may need to restart your browser after connecting the device to enable navigation.
- To navigate with your device, ensure the Scene Viewer browser window is active.
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 in ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7.1 and earlier releases is 60 minutes. In ArcGIS Enterprise 10.8 and later releases, the default time value is 12 hours.
When publishing a hosted scene layer, I receive a message that the portal token expired and publishing fails.
Scene layers (scene services) are published to the hosting server. Authorization of the hosting server is dependent on a token from the portal. If the publishing process for the scene layer does not complete before the portal token expires, publishing will fail and you will see an error message in the ArcGIS Server logs for the hosting server that token renewal failed .
The portal administrator can increase the token expiration to allow publishing to complete. Contact your portal administrator and ask them to increase the token expiration setting. Instructions can be found in Specify the default token expiration time.
This occurs if the publishing tool cannot connect to the tile cache data store. This may be due to security settings in the browser on the tile cache data store machines, or the tile cache data store may not be running. For example, the tile cache data store shuts down when the machine where it is installed is nearly out of disk space.
Contact the ArcGIS Data Store administrator and ask the administrator to confirm that the tile cache data store is running and, if it is, that the hosting server has been added as a trusted site on the tile cache data store machines.
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. The ArcGIS Data Store administrator can 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.