Building Floors can be created using the Publish Building Floor task. The input is multipatch buildings which can come from the Publish LOD2 Buildings task or from other sources such as CityEngine or 3rd party providers. The output is building floor plates and floor volumes. Floors can be created using a Building Space Use table where the building will be split into tiers or groups of floors, each with their own number of floors, floor height, space use, and color. Alternatively, building attributes such as number of floors, ground floor height, upper floor height, and roof height can be used to create the floors.

The Building Floor Creation process accomplishes the following:

• Creates 3D floor plates according to the information in the building space use table or building attributes.
• Creates floor volumes by extruding the floor plates with the calculated floor height.
• Publishes the floor plates and/or volumes to your ArcGIS organization for viewing in a web scene.

Building space use table

One option to create building floors is to use the building space use table to split the building into tiers or groups of individual floors with defined space use.

The building space use table has several attributes that describe the different tiers within the building. Each tier has an attribute defining space use, number of floors, floor color, and floor height. The BuildingTypeName attribute is the identifier that links the Building Space Use table to the building features.

Up to six tiers (with any number of floors) and a top floor are supported. In addition, roof height can be entered which defines the volume on top of the building that is not a floor, for example, air conditioners and elevator units.

The Split Buildings Into Floors geoprocessing tool requires a building feature class with space usage information and a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet also with space use information. You need to check Split by Building Space Use Table check box and populate the Minimum Floor Area, Splitting Sensitivity between 0 and 1, and XY Tolerance parameters. Also, provide a path and file name for the output feature class.

Building attributes

The other option to create building floors is to use building attributes such as number of floors, ground floor height, upper floor height, and roof height. Space use per floor is not supported. If no attributes are present, the default values are used.

The Split Buildings Into Floors geoprocessing tool requires a building feature class with number of floors information that includes fields that contain information about the number of floors, ground floor height, upper floor height, and roof height. You need to check Split by Building Floors Parameters check box, and populate the Ground Floor Height, Upper Floor Height, Minimum Floor Area, Splitting Sensitivity between 0 and 1, XY Tolerance, Shrink Floors by parameters. Also, provide a path and file name for the output feature class.

Splitting quality

Occasionally, the creation of certain floors within a complex building might fail. Use the minimum floor area, splitting sensitivity, and XY tolerance to improve the quality of the floor creation. Use Force Edge Splitting to enforce all splitting to be edge splitting. Splitting quality will be high but processing times will be slower. Use the shrink floors value to prevent Z-fighting (flickering) in your 3D scene.

Floor volumes

If you require floor volumes, use the Create Floor Volumes task to create floor volumes out of the 3D floor plates.

The Extrude By Attribute geoprocessing tool requires a building feature class with space usage information that includes floor height. You will also need to include an Extrusion Offset value and a path and file name for the output feature class.