An overview of the 3D Analyst toolbox

The 3D Analyst toolbox provides a collection of geoprocessing tools that enable a wide variety of analytical, data management, and data conversion operations on surface models and three-dimensional vector data.

3D Analyst tools provide the ability to create and analyze surface data represented in raster, terrain, triangulated irregular network (TIN), and LAS dataset formats. 3D data can be converted from a rich variety of formats, including COLLADA, lidar, SketchUp, OpenFlight, and many other data types. Analysis of geometric relationships and feature properties, interpolation of raster and various triangulated irregular network (TIN) models, and analysis of surface properties are only some of the numerous functions provided by 3D Analyst tools.

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Overview of toolsets in the 3D Analyst toolbox

Toolset	Description
3D Features	Provides tools for evaluating geometric properties and relationships between three-dimensional features.
3D Intersections	Contains tools for evaluating where overlapping 3D datasets meet and visualizing them using various representations.
3D Proximity	Contains tools for performing distance-based evaluations of 3D points, LAS point clouds, lines, and multipatch features.
Area and Volume	Contains tools that provide solutions for analyzing change between surfaces and generating volumetric representations of 3D data.
Point Cloud	Contains toolsets and tools for converting and managing LAS files, and modifying the classification of LAS data.
Raster	Contains tools for converting raster surfaces and extracting their footprint alongside tools for reclassifying raster data, interpolating surfaces from point measurements, performing math operations using cell values, and generating surface derivatives such as slope, contour, aspect, and curvature.
Statistics	Contains tools for aggregating statistics about z-enabled data from features, point clouds, raster, and triangulated surfaces.
Terrain Dataset	Contains tools to create and manage terrain datasets.
TIN Dataset	Contains tools for creating, modifying, and converting triangulated irregular network (TIN) datasets.
Triangulated Surface	Provides analysis tools that enable the determination of surface properties of TIN, terrain, and LAS datasets, such as contours, slope, aspect, hillshade, difference calculation, volumetric computations, and outlier detection.
Visibility	Features tools that enable visibility analysis to be performed using various types of observer features and obstruction sources that include surfaces, multipatches, which are great for representing structures like buildings, and 3D features.