Assessing the impact of shadows on a city or community provides valuable insights for professionals as well as community members and residents. For example, it helps you with optimizing sunlight availability in public spaces, streets, and parks. You can use shadow analysis to optimize building design and orientation. Engineers and energy consultants can evaluate shading effects on buildings and outdoor spaces to optimize energy consumption and identify suitable locations for solar energy installations and assess their potential energy generation.
Assessing shadow impact in urban areas aids in creating well-designed, sustainable, and livable cities that prioritize the well-being of residents while preserving the cultural and historical heritage of the urban landscape.
Workflows
ArcGIS provides several workflows to assess the impact of shadow. You can use interactive tools to explore shadows or leverage geoprocessing tools in ArcGIS Pro to analyze shadow impact and create shadow features in the geodatabase.
Explore shadow impact
ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Earth, and applications built with the Maps SDK for JavaScript, such as Scene Viewer, Instant Apps, and Experience Builder, offer interactive tools for exploring shadow impact.
Custom applications built with ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript can use the ShadowCast widget, which displays the cumulative shadows of 3D features in a scene view. These apps allow you to animate sunlight and shadows over time, providing a dynamic and immersive experience for assessing shadows.
Analyze shadow impact
The 3D exploratory shadow tools generate temporary results for quick adjustments analysis feedback in the scene. When your workflow requires specific design requirements, it is recommended that you create shadow features in the geodatabase.
The 3D Analyst extension in ArcGIS Pro offers two geoprocessing tools that create shadow features. The Sun Shadow Frequency geoprocessing tool calculates the number of times a location on a surface has its direct sight line to the sun and the Sun Shadow Volume geoprocessing tool models shadows cast by each feature using sunlight for a given date and time.
The shadow impact analysis tasks in the Development Impact Analysis solution offer a step-by-step guide to explore and analyze the shadow impact of proposed or existing buildings on the surrounding community. Use the Check Shadows task to visualize shadows for existing conditions and create an animation you can export out to a movie. Use the Analyze Shadows task to create shadow panels that will hold the shadow attributes and to compare the shadow impacts over time and between two scenarios such as existing and proposed conditions.
Considerations
3D exploratory shadow tools are fast and interactive but generate temporary results. Running the shadow geoprocessing tools using the 3D Analyst extension in ArcGIS Pro or the Shadow impact Analysis tasks in the Development Impact Analysis solution takes considerably more time, but you can persist the results in a geodatabase.
Required software
ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Earth, and applications built with the Maps SDK for JavaScript such as Scene Viewer, Instant Apps, and Experience Builder offer interactive tools for exploring shadow impact. You will need ArcGIS Pro with 3D Analyst to analyze shadows and persist the results in a geodatabase. You will need an ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise account to publish and share the analysis layers as a 3D scene service across your organization.
Explore the following resources to learn more about visualizing utilities in ArcGIS.
ArcGIS help documentation
Reference material for ArcGIS products:
ArcGIS blogs, stories and technical papers
Supplemental guidance about concepts, software functionality, and workflows:
Videos
Esri-produced videos that clarify and demonstrate concepts, software functionality, and workflows:
Tutorials
Guided, hands-on lessons based on real-world problems:
ArcGIS solutions
Industry-specific configurations for ArcGIS:
Esri training
Authoritative learning resources focusing on key ArcGIS skills:
Developer resources
Resources and support for automating and customizing workflows:
Esri community
Online 3D community to connect, collaborate, and share experiences:
- Ask the 3D community questions.