Creating a single contour

Contour lines are a familiar way of representing surfaces on maps. A contour is a line through all contiguous points with equal height (or other) values.

You can create contour lines for a raster, triangulated irregular network (TIN), or terrain surface. You can create contour lines by clicking a point on a surface to create a single contour line that passes through it.

Steps:

1. In ArcMap or ArcScene, click the Create Contours button .
2. Click the surface at the point where you want the contour.

The contour is added as a 3D polyline graphic. The height of the contour is written to the status bar.

Note:

• The offset allows you to control the position of the minimum contour. By default, the Create Contours tool uses the minimum input height to calculate the elevation for the minimum contour. For example, if the default minimum contour is 298 meters, you could use an offset of 2 to place the minimum contour at 300.
• The 3D polyline graphic can be copied and pasted among ArcMap, ArcScene, and ArcGlobe.
• For information about enabling the interactive tools with terrain datasets, see the following link: Interactive tools for terrain datasets.