An overview of the Functional Surface toolset

The Functional Surface toolset provides geoprocessing tools that perform analysis operations using features and various surface types.

Tool	Description
Add Surface Information	Attributes features with spatial information derived from a surface.
Interpolate Shape	Interpolates z-values for a feature class based on elevation derived from a raster, triangulated irregular network (TIN), or terrain dataset.
Intersect 3D Line With Surface	Computes the geometric intersection of 3D line features and one or more surfaces to return the intersection as segmented line features and points.
Stack Profile	Creates a table and optional graph denoting the profile of line features over one or more multipatch, raster, TIN, or terrain surfaces.
Surface Volume	Calculates the area and volume of a raster, triangulated irregular network (TIN), or terrain dataset surface above or below a given reference plane.

Overview tools in the Functional Surface toolset

The following tools that were available in the 3D Analyst toolbox prior to version 10.0 have been replaced by the enhanced Add Z Information geoprocessing tool.

Geoprocessing Tool	Recommendation
Surface Length	Use the Add Z Information tool to calculate the surface length of each line input line feature based on a surface.
Surface Spot