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11. To stop creating new features, close the Create Features window and your mouse will no longer be the Ranger stations symbol.
Exercise 1b: Digitizing lines and snapping
In the first exercise, you digitized a point over an aerial photograph; in this one, you will trace over the image to create a new line representing a road.
Because part of the road has already been created, you should use snapping to help ensure the new road feature connects to the existing roads. When snapping is turned on, your pointer will jump, or snap to, edges, vertices, and other geometric elements when it is near them. This enables you to position a feature easily in relation to the locations of other features. All the settings you need to work with snapping are located on the Snapping drop-down menu in the Edit toolbar.
Setting options for snapping
- Click the Map toolbar tab and click the Bookmarks menu to select the Digitizing roads bookmark.
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- Click OK to close the Snapping Settings dialog box.
Digitizing a line
You are now ready to begin digitizing the new road.
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In this exercise, you learned how to set up snapping and use it to help you digitize a new road that connects to existing roads.
Exercise 1c: Creating new feature templates
The Template Properties dialog box allows you to review and change the template settings. For example, you can rename a template, provide a description, set the default construction tool, and specify the attribute values that should be assigned to new features created with this template.
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You are now ready to create features using the properties specified in this feature template.
Exercise 1d: Creating new polygon features
About creating polygons
Since you have been exposed to the basic concepts and user interface elements of editing and creating features, you are now ready to learn advanced feature creation techniques. You will use several different methods to construct the polygon tract boundaries, including snapping, entering measurements, and drawing rectangles. You also will use keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus to improve productivity while creating features.
When Zion National Park became a protected area in the early 1900s, multiple owners held the land that became the park. Although Zion is mostly United States federal government land now, there are some areas within the park that are still owned privately. In this exercise, you will create some boundary lines representing the privately held features.
Creating polygons using different construction methods
Choosing a template sets up the editing environment for the settings in that template. This action sets the target layer in which your new features will be stored, activates a feature construction tool at the bottom of the ‘Create Features’ window, and prepares to assign the default attributes to the new feature. Since the layer's template is set up so the Polygon tool is the default feature construction tool, the Polygon tool becomes active.
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- Close the ‘Identify’ pop-up window.
Creating rectangular polygons
Sometimes you need to create rectangular polygons. Rather than clicking each vertex individually as you have been doing, you can use the Rectangle construction tool. The first click with the Rectangle tool creates the first vertex, then the second click establishes the "angle" of the rectangle, and the final click adds the remaining corner vertices. In addition, the Rectangle tool allows you to enter x,y coordinates for the vertices, as well as directions and lengths for the sides.
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- Move your pointer up and to the left so the rectangle is created in the correct position in relation to the existing feature, as shown above.
- Right-click and select Height….
- Type “800” to set a length of 800 meters and press Enter.
Creating adjoining polygons
You now need to create one more polygon to fill in the space between these two polygons. You could snap to every vertex, but an easier way is to use the Auto-Complete Polygon tool, which uses the geometry of existing polygons to create new adjacent polygons that do not overlap or have gaps.
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The new features have been created with the default attribute values (Private) specified in the template. If you wanted to add other information, such as ID numbers, you would select the features and type the values into the ‘Attributes’ window.
Exercise 2a: Defining new types of features to create
Sometimes you may want to create features of a certain type in an existing layer, but the layer is not set up to capture those features. For example, you want to add features to a roads layer to represent an unpaved road, but you currently only have categories in your data for freeway, major highway, and local road. Through a wizard, you can define everything about the unpaved road category at one time—making it easy to prepare your data to display and store the new types of features. ArcGIS Pro automatically adds a symbol for the new category, any required geodatabase information (such as subtype value or coded domain value) for that layer, and a feature template to use when creating an unpaved road. The wizard saves you from having to stop your work to open multiple dialog boxes to set up the data on your own.
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Now that you have added a feature template for the new type, you are ready to start creating features.
Exercise 2b: Creating features from existing features
Buffering features
You are provided with a polygon feature showing one of these research-only locations in the park and will use it to create another feature representing a buffer zone around it. You will select the original research-only polygon and use the Buffer command on the Edit menu to create the new feature.
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In this exercise, you used an editing command, Buffer, to generate a feature from an existing feature
Exercise 2c: Editing polygon features
About editing polygons
In the previous exercise, the Buffer command created a feature that is the extent of the original feature plus the buffer distance. Since this feature should just be the buffer, you need to remove the shape of the original inner feature from the current buffer feature. You can use the Clip command on the Editor menu to cut a hole in the polygon feature.
You will also use the Cut Polygons tool to split a polygon by an overlapping line feature.
Cutting a hole in a polygon
The new feature is drawn on top of the existing one. To use Clip, you need to select the underlying existing feature. The Edit tool has special capabilities to help you select the correct feature from overlapping ones.
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Since the buffer feature has a hole in it, its geometry is represented in ArcGIS as a multipart polygon. Multipart features either contain holes in them or are composed of more than one physical part that only references one set of attributes. For example, the individual islands that make up Hawaii are often represented as a multipart polygon feature.
Cutting a polygon
The neighboring research area needs to be divided into two polygons based on the river that runs through the middle. You can use the Cut Polygons tool to split the polygon.
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In this exercise, you learned how to clip polygons and split them by tracing along an overlapping line feature.
Exercise 2d: Editing vertices and segments
In the previous exercise, you edited whole features. In this exercise, you will be editing the vertices and segments that make up a feature. You can double-click a feature with the Edit tool to edit its shape. When you do this, the Edit tool pointer changes from a black arrow to a white arrow to show you can directly select vertices and modify segments.
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