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Scene services

A scene service is an ArcGIS Server web service originating from a 3D scene in ArcGIS Pro. Scene services (also known as web scene layers) allow you to share 3D content from web scenes to your ArcGIS Enterprise organization. Web scenes are similar in concept to web maps. However, instead of displaying a 2D map or feature services, they use 3D scene services and give you access to 3D content created in ArcGIS Pro.

Prerequisites for creating a scene service

How you create a scene service depends on how the scene caches are created and stored. To build and store scene caches in a system data store, publish a hosted scene layer. If you build scene caches and place them in a shared location that you maintain and register with the ArcGIS Server site, publish a scene layer that references the prebuilt cache.

Hosted scene layer

To publish a hosted scene layer (service), you must install and configure the following ArcGIS components:

  • Portal for ArcGIS
  • ArcGIS GIS Server
  • ArcGIS Data Store*
  • ArcGIS Pro

Once the above components are installed, do the following:

See Share a web scene layer in the ArcGIS Pro help or, if you create a scene layer package to publish in the portal, see Publish hosted scene layers.

Note:

When you publish a hosted scene layer, you can have its cache automatically generated by the GIS Server site. The size of the cache will determine how long it takes for it to build and for it to be available for you to view and consume the layer in Scene Viewer in the portal website. It could take minutes to hours.

Scene layers that reference prebuilt caches

To publish scene layers (services) that reference cache that you build before publishing, you'll need the following:

  • Portal for ArcGIS
  • ArcGIS GIS Server configured as the portal's hosting server
  • A federated GIS Server site (recommended)
  • A storage location registered with the federated GIS Server site
  • ArcGIS Pro

Once the above are configured, build the cache and place it in the registered storage location. See Publish a scene layer from a cache dataset for instructions.