Curves

Available with Location Referencing license.

ArcGIS Pipeline Referencing supports curves through densifying centerlines with curves into polylines to preserve shape and to build routes within an LRS Network. When a centerline is created with a curve in an edit session, Pipeline Referencing automatically converts the curve into a densified polyline.

Note:

The start and end vertices of a curved centerline are not affected by densification. Only the intermediate vertices between the start and end of a curved centerline are affected.

Note:

Once densified, the Shape_Length attribute of the densified centerline may shorten slightly. This is expected because the densification process adjusts the curve within a tolerance to create a near-identical shape.

Densification method

When a centerline is created or modified to contain curves, these curves become autodensified. The curve is autodensified by maxDeviation. The maxDeviation parameter determines the maximum distance a newly placed vertex on a densified polyline can deviate from the original location of the curve.

The maxDeviation formula is 2 * (XY Resolution) * 100.

Note:

The densification process runs automatically in the background and does not support user interaction.

Auto-Densification example

In the following example, a curve was created with a length of 1,000 meters and an x,y resolution of 0.0001 meters.

The curve is densified after a centerline edit session by maxDeviation. This would be 2 * 0.0001 *100, with a result of 0.02. This factor is used to create vertices at defined intervals along the curve to create a segmented section where the curve previously existed. Once this value is calculated, densification is performed on the curve, densifying it into a line feature with 94 vertices.

Original polyline and vertices and densified polyline and new vertices