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Cesium Release Roundup April 2019

This month we added ZIP file support to Cesium ion, sped up BIM/CAD tiling by 15x in our 3D tiling pipeline, and added support for ImageBitmap in CesiumJS. See details on all of our major releases and and product upgrades below.

Cesium ion Updates

Highlights of recent improvements:

  • Cesium ion now supports uploading ZIP files, which greatly reduces the upload time and bandwidth usage for most source data types.
  • Improved error reporting to tell users about problems with assets they’ve uploaded.
  • Fixed a long-standing problem with usage tracking so that all users are now accounted for and can view their usage on the usage page.

Improvements to the 3D tiling pipeline:

  • Rewrote the BIM/CAD tiling algorithm from the ground up. The tiler is now 15x faster and produces significantly better tilesets for BIM/CAD input.
  • Fixed a variety of photogrammetry-related bugs including robustness improvements for RealityCapture models.
  • Added support for non-north-up imagery.

Sign up for a free account if you’re new to Cesium ion.

NYC 3-D Building Model

The official New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications CityGML model is a set of 20 CityGML files totaling 12.8 GB. Now you can upload it to ion as a single 874 MB ZIP file.

CesiumJS 1.56 Release

Featured updates to the CesiumJS 1.56 release:

  • Added support for ImageBitmap to greatly speed up texture upload and decrease frame drops when loading models with large textures.
  • Added support for touch and hold gestures.
  • Fixed a type of crash caused by the camera being rotated through terrain.

For the full list of changes to CesiumJS, see the change log.

CesiumJS 1.79.1
57 MB | Mar 01, 2021

Powered by Cesium

Did you see the globaltimoto app by community member Tim Jules Hull tracking his motorcycle journey around the world to document local games and sports? It’s a great use of Cesium, and Tim talks through how he recently built his app on Cesium, after previously trying NASA Web WorldWind and Shockwave.

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Also catching our eye is the National Library of Scotland, which made 250 years of historical maps available in 3D, including hundreds of layers of detailed georeferenced maps in its new 3D Historic Map Viewer built on Cesium.

Lastly, the Cesium team is headed to FOSS4G NA, April 15–18. If you’re going, stop by our booth to say hi!