Calculating surface area and volume

In this section, we will calculate the surface area and volume of a fishing pond of length 200 meters, width 80 meters, and depth 5 meters. We will also explore a fourth way to create 3D features: by generating multipatch features between two 3D surfaces. The Esri GIS Dictionary defines the multipatch in the ArcGIS context, as "a type of geometry comprised of planar three-dimensional rings and triangles, which occupies discrete area or volume in three-dimensional space" (A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems, Tasha Wade and Shelly Sommer, Esri Press).

Follow these steps to start calculating the area and volume of a rectangular prism using the 3D Analyst tools in the ArcScene application:

1. Start the ArcScene application, and open your scene document named My3DFeatures.sxd stored in the <drive>:\LearningArcGIS\Chapter8\3DAnalyst folder.

First we will add a new field in the attribute table of the FishPond_3D layer. The...