I have been trying to buffer 15 polygons (-15m) in ArcMap. I did a batch buffer and 13 polygons worked fine, the other 2 have not buffered, an error occurs:
WARNING 000117: Warning empty output generated.
Executed (Buffer) successfully.
End Time: Fri Jul 06 18:58:32 2012 (Elapsed Time: 1.00 seconds)
All the input polygons are similar with full attribute tables so the output should not be empty for these 2!
Best Answer
If the negative buffer distance is large enough to collapse the polygon to nothing, a null geometry will be generated. A warning message will be given, and any null geometry features will not be written to the output feature class. (ESRI)
Any chance that some of your polygons when buffered by a negative value would result in a null geometry?
You can control and flag this programatically with ArcObjects (not sure about python) by trapping the error and skipping (not creating a feature for) the "culprit" polygons.