Drawing an Area

You can draw polygonal areas in your experience. These drawings can then be used later on as areas of interest.

This task shows you how to:

Before you begin:
  • Drawings are created in the current experience context, no entity is created. Therefore, they cannot be search for or shared. Besides, they have no associated GIS attributes.
  • Multi-selection is not supported.
See Also
Drawing a Polyline
Creating an Annotation
Displaying Object Properties
Polygon Representation Attributes

Draw an Area From Scratch

You can draw a area in your experience.

  1. From the Create section of the action bar, click Create Area .
    The cursor shape changes to .
  2. Click a first point.
    By default, the first created point intersects the ground and gives the polygon its altitude.

    The cursor shape changes to .

  3. Click another point to draw a border of the area.
    The distance from the previous point in the polyline as well as the length of the segment is displayed.

    A new area dataset is created in the tree under the Created Items node.

    Important:
    • Point handles (vertices) are placed in a XYZ coordinate space based on the picking manipulator location (that is, the intersection with the closest item to the camera under the mouse cursor). This means that you cannot click a point in the sky, but only on the ground or on one of the loaded items.
    • The location of point handles is determined at the time the point is created or moved. Therefore, points located on items with various levels of details (such as the ground mesh) are not updated when zooming in or out. They keep their initial location in space.
  4. Optional: To remove a point, click it.
  5. Click a third point to close the area.
    The polygonal area is colorized in black and the polygon length (as seen from vertically above) is calculated.

  6. To stop drawing, click Create Area (or any other command in the action bar).

Draw an Area From a Cloned Item

You can use an existing loaded geometry to create polylines. This geometry can be either a prepared dataset or a dataset in preview.

Before you begin: Polygons with holes and multipolygons are not supported.
  1. Click a geometry in the 3D view.


  2. From the View section of the action bar, click Properties .
  3. Click .
    The selected geometry is cloned and the cloned item is displayed under the Created Item node in the tree view.
    Important: After the cloning, the source object and the cloned one can be modified independently from each other.

Edit an Area

You can modify the shape of areas, whether created from scratch, or from an existing loaded geometry.

  1. From the Create area of the action bar, click Edit Mode .

    If Edit Mode is deactivated, you can still select objects but not edit their shape anymore. You can only edit the representation attributes available in the Properties panel.

    This mode is not available if you have a read-only access to the dashboard.

  2. Click a polygon in the tree view or in the experience to display handles.
    Cloned area

    Area created from scratch

    Important: A polygon can only be flat, which means that moving a vertical handle modifies the altitude of the whole polygon.

    The altitude of the polygon is determined by the first point you click in the experience, and you can only change it with the vertical handle.

  3. Optional: Click anywhere on the polygon to add new point handles.
    Cloned area

    Area created from scratch


  4. Drag handles to modify the shape of the geometry.
    Cloned area - Drag white handle

    Area created from scratch - Drag vertical handle

  5. From the View section of the action bar, click Properties , and then modify the properties according to your needs.
    Cloned area

    Area created from scratch