Curves

Available with Location Referencing license.

ArcGIS Roads and Highways 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, Roads and Highways 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.