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Random Points In Polygons

Generates random points located in the polygons of the input polygon dataset. The number of points per polygon can be constant or different for each polygon - based on the values in a numeric field of the input polygon feature class.

Inputs:

• A polygon feature class
• The number of points per polygon can be input in one of the following ways
  • A numeric field which values will be used to get the number of points to be generated per polygon.
  • A constant number
• Optional: The maximum number of points per polygon. This parameter is to enforce max number of points if a field is used for getting the number of points to be generated. For example if a field is selected and the values in this field range from 5 to 50,000. And the maximum number of points is set to 100, on the polygons that have values > 100 in the field only 100 points will be generated. The default value is 500. 

Outputs:

• New Point feature class.
• The following fields are added to the attribute table of the resulting feature class.
  • [ET_ID] - the ID of the original polygon 
  • [ET_X] - the X coordinate of the point
  • [ET_Y] - the Y coordinate of the point

Note: Be careful with assigning the number of points per polygon. The function will try to create N unique points on the polygon and if the number of points allocated is too large, might be very slow or even fall into an indefinite loop.

Illustration: