Brian,

A good question - thanks for the post.

The height of building features is not included in the attribute table of buildings polygons. Not because it can't be calculated but because it wasn't thought about as a derived product.

However the issue is that buildings are rarely a single height but you will need to decide what you want to record, maximum heigt, minimum height, average height or some other statistical measure to represent building height.

The building polygons are 3d polygon features BUT - these will only be values for the polygon exterior and not representative of the interior of buildings.

A better way to determine building heights would be to create a first return surface from the LAS file and then subtract the values from the bare earth.

First return - bare earth = height

Then using the building footprints you could summarize the height values for buildings and use the FID to uniquely id each building polygon. In Spatial Analyst I believe that you would use the Summarize by Zones tool but I'm not at work and don't have the toolbox available to check.

Hmmmm - sounds like a great tool! I may have to toy with that one.

tim