Creating Features by Digitizing in ArcGIS Pro

hi guys welcome to another arcgis Pro tutorial in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to digitize features which could either be points lines or polygons with the help of a base map like this using arcgis Pro now before we get started I'm going to select a base map that's going to be appropriate for what I'm going to be doing and by default you can see that I have World topographic map as my default base map however for this purpose I think it would be more appropriate if I were to go with this open street map option or alternatively you can decide to go with any of these other Maps as well if that suits your purpose however I'm just going to go with the open street maps and after that I'm just going to zoom into my point of Interest which again might be completely different depending on what you are looking for and my objective today would be to show you guys how to digitize different feature types which belongs to different feature classes which could either be points polygons or lines quickly and efficiently so we'll get started by learning how to digitize line features or polyline features Now using polyline features you can digitize a number of things on a map like this and just by looking at this off the top of my head I can see that I could easily use polyline features to digitize a couple of rods here and there so that's exactly what I'm going to do so before we actually get started with digitizing features it's a good idea to think of a folder or a particular place to which you would like to save your final results and right over here you can see that I have actually created an empty folder called creating features in arcgis Pro and my objective or my target essentially would be to create all the different types of features that I'm going to construct through this exercise inside this folder so what I'm going to do is I'm going to first open up the catalog panel by heading over to view and from here I can select catalog Pane and if you head over to folders and right click you can add a folder connection so to add a folder connection what I'm going to do is I'm basically going to navigate into my empty folder which happens to be this folder number 63 and click ok and now if you expand these folders you will see that a connection now has been created to my empty folder which is called creating features in arcgis Pro and in order to get started with digitizing some roads I'm going to right click over here and go to new and select shape file because now we are going to create a new shape file by the name of rods and that shapefile is going to be off the polyline type so as you can see over here the feature class name is going to be roads and the geometry type is going to be not polygon but polyline and I'm not going to have any Z or M values for my features and right over here when it comes to coordinate system it's quite important to decide what sort of a coordinate system that you are going to use and for my case I would just stick with the coordinate reference system of my current map which happens to be wgs 1984 web Mercator coordinate reference system however you have the choice of going with the different coordinate reference system as well if you wish to do so by clicking right over here and once you're happy with the settings of this create feature class panel you can just click run and that's going to create this kind of an empty rods polyline feature class to which you could digitize and add different polyline features so that's exactly what we are going to do so let's get rid of these two panels for the time being and if I would right click on this Rhodes polyline feature class and if I head over to attributes table you can see that right now well as you might have guessed we don't really have any records over here because it's basically an empty shape file at the moment and I'm not going to close this attributes table I'm just going to leave it hanging somewhere over here just so that you could see as I digitize so as I create new features all those records are going to get added into this attributes table so let's just keep it docked somewhere over here and in order to create features what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that I have selected these rods over here and we can head over to edit and select create and after that if I were to click over here on roads you will see a number of different ways that I could create line features well to start I could go with line or right angle line if that really suits my purpose but I think I can stick to this line option to get started and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a line feature just by digitizing over this Rod right here as you can see and once you're done with it you can just simply double click in order to conclude the digitizing or you can just head over to this button right over here and select finish and just like that you got your very first record or the very first line feature which also got added to your attributes table right over here as you can see it's still appearing in the sand color even though the color that we have selected over here is gray is because this feature is still being selected so if you want to deselect basically everything you can head over to this button right over here and clear all the selections and just like that you would be able to see the original color of the rod well you also have the option to change these colors as well if you would just click right over here this kind of symbology panel will open up and you can go with one of these default 2D line types if that's what you wish to do or you could go to properties and select a color of your choice let's say for this case I'm just going to go with this kind of pink color just so that it would stand out slightly from the other features of the map and let's increase the thickness or the line width as well to be something like this and once you're happy with the edits what you can do is you can head over to save and that's going to basically save all the edits just like this however as I mentioned to you guys you are not just limited to one record or one feature you can add multiple features basically as many features as you like to this same road shape file or the same rods polyline feature class and to demonstrate that I'm basically going to maybe add another feature just like this and this time I'm just going to double click and now you can see that if I clear all the selections I do have now two roads and before I go ahead and conclude digitizing polyline feature classes what I'm going to do is I'm also going to draw a line across this smallen road as well and I would like to make sure that the third line that I'm going to create is connected to these first two lines that I drew beforehand now when establishing such kind of connections it's quite important that you have turned on this snapping option that you can see right over here now for me it has been turned on already let's see if it was turned off for some reason you can see that it's kind of hard to pinpoint to an exact location I might think that this point sort of touches this existing line but if I were to zoom in I might find out that it's still located maybe a couple of meters or even a couple of millimeters away from this original line so it's merely impossible for us to kind of pinpoint to an exact location to a certain the fact that I'm going to start my third line from a point that's connected to this existing line and that's where this snapping tool comes in handy so what we have to do is we can just turn this on and now you can see that as I move my mouse pointer over here it basically snaps to this existing polyline features and it also states that it's the roads shape file and it's snapping to the edge which basically happens to be a point when we are talking about a line so what I can do is I can start my line somewhere from here and keep on digitizing just like this and finally to conclude I can make use of this snapping option and just double click over here and now I can guarantee that these two lines are connected to each other so let's deselect all the features again and if you were to select any of these features just like this by taking the select tool you can see that the corresponding record gets highlighted in this attribute table as well if I were to select this middle rod and the one on the side you can see that corresponding record gets highlighted accordingly and it would be interesting to maybe add another column to this attributes table when you're digitizing things just so that you could add some sort of a text or maybe some sort of a comment to make sure that you distinguish these different lines from each other and to do that what you can do is you can first make sure that you save all your edits just like this click yes and after that you can head over to this add field button and currently you can see that we have three different fields we have the FID we have the shape type and we have another field called ID and as the fourth field I'm just going to add another column call name and quite important you have to select the appropriate data type and since I'm just going to type some text in the appropriate data type for this is going to be text however let's say if you were to go with a column like maybe the length of the rod then you might have to select the appropriate data type which probably happens to be double long or short or float which can take in numerical figures so in this case we're going to stick with text and after that we can head over to the save button and make sure that we save that in and now if you get rid of this field step you will see that a new column has been added to the attributes table of this Rod shape file now to edit the records all you have to do is just double click right over here for example let's say if I'm going to go with this first line which corresponds to this Rod well I can double click over here and for the time being I'm just going to add a random name called rod1 and let's say for the second Road I'm just going to name it as Row 2 and this one as Road 3 but of course in your case you might have very specific names depending on what type of features you're digitizing and once you're done with that you can head back to edit and save again and that's going to make sure that it saves all the edits all right guys so that's the way to digitize polyline feature classes and now let's see how to digitize a couple of polygon feature classes as well and the process is going to be relatively similar all you have to do is head back to view and open the catalog pane and make sure that you navigate to your working folder right click go to new and we're going to create a new shape file and this time I'm going to name it as let's say Parks because I'm just going to digitize a couple of packs around here and the geometry type sure enough is going to be polygons we do not have any M or Z values and the coordinate system I'm going to stick with the current maps coordinate reference system after that you can click on run and as you can see right over here a new layer which is polygon feature class layer gets added into our table of contents as you can see right over here called pucks if I were to check the attributes table of box you can see that new tab gets opened up over here in addition to these roads attributes table but sure enough the packs attributes table is going to be a completely empty one and our objective now would be to sort of basically fill that in now before I get started with digitizing a couple of packs if I were to open back the folder to which I save this Rod shape file you can see that a number of different files which essentially make up this Rod shape file is recorded right over here for example we have the prj file which records the projection information and we have the dbf file which takes the records of the attribute information so as soon as we saved our work you can see that an S3 shape file got created in in our working folder as well alright so to get started with box I'm going to make sure that I have selected this Sparks layer and let's go to edit and select create and this time select box and I'm going to get started with this polygon option even though we have a number of other options as well for example if you know that the thing that you're going to digitize is going to be a circle you can well basically go ahead with this or if it's going to be a rectangle you can go with this option but the parts that I'm going to digitize are actually going to be irregularly shaped box so that's why I'm going to stick with this option and let's go ahead and maybe digitize this spark right over here so all you have to do is just make sure that you get the final Point like this and in order to conclude you can just head over to this button right over here and that'll add the first record into our attributes table as well now when digitizing polygons it might be handy to make sure that you don't really use a fill color to start with because sometimes that fill color can actually get in the way of you accurately being able to trace the corners of the of the polygon so in order to get rid of the fill color what you can do is you can select this color patch right over here and make sure that you select no color however at the border with a relatively large thickness just so that you would be able to see what you are digitizing and after that click apply and now if I clear the selection you can see that we have one polygon covering this spark right over here and similarly let's go with maybe another green area which I assume to be a pack and we can double click to finish our edits and you can see that a separate record got added to my attributes table over here as well and let's try to create another Park just like this double click so you can see that we have now three polygons and I could actually add another Park covering this polygon as well however we've been doing so I would like to make sure that I do not leave any gaps right around this corner when I create my fourth polygon so in order to make sure that you do not leave any gaps what you can do is you can actually use this autocomplete polygon option instead of using this polygon tool so let me show you how this works so for example if you were to go with this option you can see that now it snaps to this vertex point right at the corner and that could be my starting point and after that I could digitize along the boundary like this and right over here I can make sure that I select right on this vertex instead of clicking on somewhere else and after that I could just freely draw a polygon inside the boundary of this adjacent polygon because as soon as I double click right over here on the same vertex you would see that that additional polygon piece just basically vanished and it created a new polygon exactly along the boundaries of this adjacent polygon which is exactly what I wanted and that got added as a new record as you can see over here which is pretty cool because if you would do it manually and if you would just trace it along the boundary then there's a good chance that you might end up creating some some whites along the way alright now if I clear all the selections you can see that now I have digitized four polygons well once you're done with that you can again go ahead and you can select the color of your choice as the fill color I'm going to go with this kind of a dark green and let's make sure that we decrease the outline width compared to what we have right now all right so just like that you can see that we have four different polygons as you can see over here and once you're happy with all the edits you can just click save and that will save these polygons into this polygon feature class Slayer called packs and as I showed you guys before I could maybe add another column to this layer as well and give maybe separate names to these different items but since you guys get the idea I'm not really going to do that and finally I'm going to show you guys how to create Point features which now might be quite self-explanatory given that you guys learned how to create rods and Parks which happen to be polyline feature classes and polygon feature classes so in order to create points what you have to do is you can head over to view and go to catalog pane and right click go to new select shape file and I'm just going to pass a name called pois which probably could stand for points of interest because I do not really see anything specifically that I would like to Mark as a point but just for the sake of this tutorial let's call it pois and this time the geometry type is going to be point which has no zom values and the coordinate system is going to be the same coordinate system of the map after that click run and now to create new Point features all you have to do is make sure you select Bois go to edit and click on create select pois and let's go with this first point option and it's going to be extremely easy all you have to do is just leave points at locations where you find anything interesting so there happens to be a mask right over here I think let's go and add a point right over there and what else do I find interesting let's say there's a healthcare center over here and we have something that appears to be to libraries and this church right over here as well so you guys get the basic idea and once you're done with all the edits you can just click save over here and select yes if you were to open up the attributes table now you would see that the attributes table has basically six different records which corresponds to each of these different points and of course you can play with the symbology as well if you wish to do so by maybe selecting a color that stands out just a bit more just like this and as I mentioned to you guys you could add description for each of these different records as well if you wish to do so how as I mentioned to you guys I'm not going to do that and now if you get rid of your base map for the time being you can see that you have all these different types of features which belongs to three different feature classes which are points polylines and polygons right on your map and not only that you can see that accordingly the files got created in your working folder as well and if you would like to pass these shape files to somebody else all you have to do is just select all these files and make sure that you pass all the files accordingly without leaving any of the files behind so guys that's pretty much it for this tutorial even though the digitizing process was relatively easy I hope you guys learned something new and if you did like the tutorial show your support by hitting the thumbs up button and don't forget to subscribe to this channel as well I'll see you guys again with another tutorial

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 3,913

Keywords: digitizing in arcgis pro, how to digitize in arcgis pro, digitizing polygons in arcgis pro, how to digitize features in arcgis pro, digitising in arcgis, arcgis digitizing, how to digitize shapefiles using arcgis, digitizing shapefiles using arcgis, arcgis tutorial for digitizing, how to digitize a polygon using arcgis, digitizing lines using arcgis, digitization in arcgis, how to digitize on a basemap

Id: uXPrIGgbi58

Length: 20min 48sec (1248 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023