A BuildingSceneLayer allows you to display and analyze detailed building models created from 3D BIM data. These building models are usually exported from Building Information Modeling (BIM) projects. Unlike 3D object scene layers, which represent all features within a single layer, building scene layers are organized into a hierarchy of sublayers representing individual building components such as walls, light fixtures, and mechanical systems. These sublayers are often grouped by disciplines like architecture, structural, or mechanical. This structure enables deeper interaction and analysis of both interior and exterior features, providing insight into how a building is designed, used, and situated in its spatial context.
Structure
Building scene layers visualize complex digital models of buildings and allow you to interact with all the components of the building such as walls, light fixtures, and mechanical systems. Due to the high complexity, the data in BuildingSceneLayer is organized into a hierarchy of building sublayers. The sublayers of the building scene layer are:
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An overview sublayer: contains just the building components necessary to visualize the exterior shell of the building. In cases where viewing the interior features of a building are not required, the overview sublayer provides a means to quickly visualize the building's exterior. The overview sublayer is optional and may not exist for every building scene layer. When it is present the overview is built during the creation of the underlying model, which is usually made up of building components on the outside of the model merged into a single feature.
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A full model sublayer: contains all building components that are organized into a hierarchy of sublayers, grouped by discipline such as architectural, mechanical, or structural.
Due to the complexity of the building scene layer, the data in this layer is organized using BuildingSublayer to represent a building component (BuildingComponentSublayer) or a group of components (BuildingGroupSublayer).
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BuildingComponentSublayer: a sublayer that contains 3D object or point features representing building components like doors, pipes, or air conditioning units. The buildling component sublayer contains data that can be rendered in the view. -
BuildingGroupSublayer: a group that manages a hierarchy of sublayers. Used to group building component sublayers into disciplines (for example, architectural, mechanical, or structural); however, this sublayer could contain the building component data in this group and additional groups.
The building scene layer often contains an overview building component sublayer that can be loaded to display the exterior shell of a building. This provides a preview of the entire building without loading all interior features. The building scene layer might also contain a full model building group sublayer with all the features in a building grouped by disciplines. Each discipline is a building group sublayer containing building component sublayers with features such as rooftops, walls, doors, air conditioning units, lighting fixtures, columns, or foundations.
Add buildings to local scene view
Building data coming from a Revit or from IFC files can be imported and published as a scene service using ArcGIS Pro version 2.3. To add a building scene layer to a local scene view, create the building scene layer with a link to the portal item.
Extract the sublayer for the building overview and set the visibility on the layer as true.
Similar logic can be utilized to retrieve the full model sublayer. Depending on your application requirements, you can provide some sort of toggle between the two layers so only the overview or full model layer is displayed at a time.
Lastly, you need to add the building scene layer as an operational layer to the scene, then take the scene and attach it to the view to display on the map.
Visualization
Being able to visualize detailed building information in its spatial context and landscape is a useful capability. To extract even more information from the visualization, attribute driven renderers can be assigned to a BuildingComponentSublayer.Renderer. For example, the Doors sublayer can use a UniqueValueRenderer to render all the interior doors that need replacement with a red color. For more details, see Symbols, renderers, and styles topic to investigate different renderers that can be applied to data.
Filtering data
Features in a building scene layer often obstruct one another. Attribute based filtering can be used to display only the features that satisfy a certain SQL expression. Use BuildingFilter to filter features based on their attributes. A building filter uses BuildingFilterBlock to define conditions for displaying or hiding components. Only a single filter block may apply to a feature at a time and the order of the filter blocks influences the order in which the filter blocks are applied. For example, it is common to filter floors within a building scene to display the selected floor with its original texture (BuildingSolidFilterMode) while displaying the floors below the selected floor with a semi-transparent white color, referred to as an xray view (BuildingXrayFilterMode).
Identify features
It can be helpful to allow users working with a building scene layer to identify features and display the associated attribute information.
Querying
Querying a BuildingComponentSublayer retrieves results from the attributes in the associated feature layer. Queries on the component sublayer are important because they are made on all the features in the component sublayer.