Deriving the existing features' heights from a surface

You can convert 2D features to 3D features by deriving the height value from a surface. There are two geoprocessing tools that allow you to obtain 3D properties from a surface: Interpolate Shape and Add Surface Information. Both of these tools require an ArcGIS 3D Analyst extension license and can be found in the Functional Surface toolset in the 3D Analyst toolbox.

The Interpolate Shape tool converts a 2D point, polyline, or polygon feature class into a 3D feature class by interpolating z-values for input features from a surface. The input surface can either be a raster, triangulated irregular network (TIN), or terrain dataset.

The Add Surface Information tool uses a surface to interpolate heights for features, converting them to 3D, and then writes the property values as attributes to the input feature class.

Attributes from the input are copied to the output. For more information on these tools and other 3D Functional Surface tools, see An Overview of the Functional Surface toolset.