Help - analysis of vertical surfaces

[ThamiCroeser]

Hey all, I need a bit of help.

I am currently working on a project that requires me to map a number of properties of walls in the Melbourne CBD.

I have data on the building footprints, as well as some info on building heights.

This has enabled me to extrude the footprints to get a suitable-looking 3D city - but I can't edit the walls! I've also tried creating a TIN using the building height data, but that comes out pretty broken. I need a neat, consistent way of preparing the walls for analysis.

Ideally I'm hoping to place a 0.5m raster mesh over every wall in the city, so that I can look analyse qualities like shading, height, aspect and wall material on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

Any ideas on how to do this?

[CarrieDavis]

Hi,

Because your extruded building footprints are considered to be one whole feature, you may not edit individual faces or assign attributes to individual walls of that feature.  With the extruded features the vertical extent (z) value may be edited, not the horizontal extent. 

Editing extruded polygons
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//00q80000012t000000

I'm not sure why you need to edit your walls of the footprints. You might want to look into using CityEngine if you are interested creating rules for assigning wall textures based on attributes.

http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine/features

If you are interested in adding 3D buildings to a DEM you may want to check out this forum post: http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/57030-how-to-add-3d-buidings-to-dem