Limiting raster processing area by geometry

Question

I have a map with a vector feature dataset of soil types, and a feature dataset of points.

I want to transform the soil dataset to raster, but I only need the results around the points (a buffer with specific distance around all these points) and my area of calculation is huge so processing the whole area takes a lot of time. The normal process that I will have to go through is shown below (left to right). My desired output is the clipped rasterized data on the right side.

Is there any way that instead of using "polygon to raster" for the whole area and then clipping the raster using a buffer around the points, I create the buffer first and then limit the calculations inside the buffer? Calculating the whole area needs a lot of time and creates rasters as huge as 10 GB and I have to do this for many layers.

Answer 1

I can think of two solutions

Solution 1

Create a relatively simple model in model builder that iterates over your province boundaries, these would select a subset of your point data. You would then create a new buffer layer from those selected points and use that to do the clip, but importantly also use it to set the environment setting, processing extent. You will create as many rasters as you have provinces.

A final step is to mosaic these rasters and you can either mosaic to a new raster (which will probably create a huge unusable raster) or mosaic into a mosaic dataset.

Solution 2

Looking at your question your appear to be rasterizing the soils dataset first, creating a huge raster. Why don't you just buffer your points and clip the soils vector dataset first and then convert that layer to a raster?