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Cesium Releases in May 2022

Gabby Getz

We’ve made improvements across the Cesium platform this month, and a big part of that has been increasing momentum for 3D Tiles Next. Last week the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) sent out a request for public comment on the proposed update to the 3D Tiles Community Standard. Share your comments with them by May 25.

CesiumJS 1.93 Release 

CesiumJS 1.93 is now available with numerous improvements and bug fixes. Highlights of the release include: 

  • Improved rendering of ground and sky atmosphere.
Sun over hills in CesiumJS

Community member Xavier Tassin has contributed atmospheric improvements from his GeoFS flight simulator into CesiumJS.

  • Added debugWireframe and support for morph targets, skins, and animations in ModelExperimental.
  • KmlDataSource now exposes the camera and canvas properties, which are used to provide information about the state of the Viewer when making network requests for a Link. Passing these values in the constructor is now optional.
  • Added GeoJsonSource.process to support adding features without removing existing entities, similar to CzmlDataSource.process.
Debug view with wireframe of Cesium drone in CesiumJS

Adding debugWireframe to ModelExperimental will give developers better tools to troubleshoot models in CesiumJS.

See the changelog for a full list of updates and links to the discussion & code on each one. You can also subscribe to the Cesium roundup release thread on the community forum to get notifications about our monthly releases.

Download CesiumJS 1.93

Cesium for Unreal 1.13.0 Release

Cesium for Unreal has been updated for both Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Engine 4. Some exciting improvements this month include:

  • It’s now possible to access the feature data in tilesets from an Unreal Engine Material! This enables a wide range of effects, from styling buildings based on their height to making areas marked as windows in a feature texture translucent.
New York City buildings colored by height in Unreal Engine

Using a custom Material to style Cesium OSM Buildings by height.

  • Added support for quantized-mesh terrain tilesets with a “parent” tileset. Importantly, this makes terrain layered on top of Cesium World Terrain in Cesium ion work correctly.
  • Significantly improved the performance of the “Forbid Holes” Tileset option.
  • Added support for the 3DTILES_batch_table_hierarchy extension. Among other things, this allows access to the metadata in Cesium OSM Buildings.

Check the Cesium for Unreal (UE4) changelog, the Cesium for Unreal (UE5) changelog, the Cesium for Unreal Samples release, and the Cesium Native 0.15.0 changelog for the full list of updates. 

Download the Cesium for Unreal plugin for UE5 from GitHub
Download the Cesium for Unreal plugin for UE4 from Epic Marketplace
Download the Cesium for Unreal Samples

Powered by Cesium

At GEOINT this month we showed a number of remarkable projects built with the Cesium platform for modeling and simulation. Our newest is from the GRILL at the Air Force Research Lab. They’ve built a plugin for bringing DIS, an IEEE standard for training simulations, into Cesium for Unreal. With the plugin, multiple players can interact with a geospecific simulation on a high accuracy globe. 

DIS in Cesium for Unreal by the GRILL at AFRL

The GRILL's plugin brings DIS into Cesium for Unreal for simulation exercises.