ArcGIS Tutorial: Converting surface data to vector data

Although triangulated irregular networks (tins) and terrain datasets are considered vector surfaces, they actually contain additional information based on features that may be more useful in the original format, such as points, lines, or polygons. In ArcGIS, you can easily convert surface data to vector features. By applying this conversion action during selection, overlay, edit, or multi-layer modeling, you will enhance your analytical capabilities.

You may want to convert three surfaces to vector data, such as points, lines, and polygons. You can convert raster, TIN, and Terrain dataset surfaces to vector data using three different methods.

　　Raster surface to Vector features

Raster surfaces that contain elevations are typically extracted as polygon feature data that can be used for multivariate analysis, location suitability analysis, overlay analysis, or other analytical operations. You can use several geoprocessing tools to convert a raster surface to vector feature data.

The following example uses the raster to polygon tool to convert a DEM raster to a polygon to be analyzed. This analysis finally generates a classification polygon feature that can be used in conjunction with other feature layers.

　　

　TIN Surface to Vector features

Converting a TIN to a feature requires only a few steps. You can extract slope and aspect polygon feature classes directly from the tin surface, or you can extract the elevation values of nodes in a tin as Point feature classes. Such features extracted from a TIN can be used like the slope and polygon features extracted from the raster. You can use a variety of geoprocessing tools to convert TIN features to vector features. These tools can be found in the 3D Analyst Toolbox transformation >> from the TIN-to-go toolset.

The following shows an example of converting a TIN to a point feature layer.

　　

　　Terrain data set surface to vector features

Terrain datasets are unique because vector feature classes must participate in the creation of terrain datasets. This means that you are completely likely to have access to point, line, or polygon feature data in a terrain that is the source data. However, when you create a terrain dataset, the multipoint feature may actually be embedded in the dataset. You can use the Remove feature class from terrain tool to extract the Multipoint feature class embedded in the terrain dataset.

For other Terrain surface-vector transformations, the process is similar to tin-vector feature transformations. However, there is a clear difference between the two transformations that you need to first convert the terrain dataset to a TIN. The advantage of this is that, as long as the terrain DataSet pyramid allows you to generate a TIN at a non-full resolution level of detail, you can select the DataSet Pyramid. This approach can greatly enhance performance because it does not select all nodes at full resolution when performing feature conversions.

ArcGIS Tutorial: Converting surface data to vector data