Dear Aaron,

I can not ensure you that it will work for that much amount of data, but huge datasets are managed by GIS people of my team using a programming lenguage called R. It is free and easily linkable with phyton in order to visualize things in ArcGis. The colleague who's specialized on this is Mauricio Zambrano: [email protected] Maybe he can help you further. 

Best regards,

Oscar

Hello Aron,

I am not sure about what i am going to write but maybe you can try using netcdf format... Arcgis read this format, and unstructured grid results can be stocked into netcdf files. The problem is that behind the huge datasize you get, I am not sure this solution would be efficient. Keep me in touch about this subject !

Cheers,

Jeff

Hi Aron,

I've worked on quite a few kinds of visualization. I don't work with ArcGIS but I would guess that in a 64 bit version 20 million nodes with 40 million elements should be OK if you have enough ram on your system.

Anyway if you would consider other software from which to view your data you may want to try Visit (https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit) which I believe you can use to view many different formats including GIS (https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/faqs/faq12). Visit is free by the way.

Other you may want to consider is Paraview (http://www.paraview.org/overview/). Both Visit and Paraview are essentially scientific visualization softwares.

Check also if SAGA (http://www.saga-gis.org/en/index.html), GRASS GIS (http://grass.osgeo.org/) or Qgis (http://www.qgis.org/en/site/) do what you're looking for GIS software specifically (all of them free and open-source).

Hope it helps.

Hi Aron,

I would try to convert your file into las file format and import it into ArcMap as a multipoint features (Conversions/LAS to Multipoint).

Best Regared, Kaz

Hi Jeff and Andreas, as far I know NETCDF has now native support for unstrucutred grid data and it is on its way since ages. I know that Rich Signell worked on this stuff but I am not aware of any final consents on the format. Can u please make more clear, how u save unstructured data into netcdf and which program will read this data?

I like to thank for the answers, I will study this and we will work on this and when we have some solution that we are intending to chose I will post it here and see your comments.

Oscar, Pedro and Kaz, many thanks for this answers we will think about everything and let u know what we have and going to try.

Cheers

Aron

Andreas, unfortunately it is not an option for us to raster an unstructured grid, we have anyway our standard with netcdf, defined by ourselves for unstructured meshes. However, still, we need to import it.  Bilinear interpolation of triangular data on any kind of structured grid, super simple. But imagine u have grid sizes from 10km to 1m over a big domain, say 100km², if you want to have every detail u should raster this with 1m, right? I guess u see where the goes, exactly nowhere ...