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Cesium Releases in July 2022

Gabby Getz

We’ve introduced a number of initiatives across Cesium this month to make developing Cesium applications easier. First, we introduced Cesium ion Teams, making it possible for organizations to manage access tokens and assets within a team. 

We also published a number of tutorials. Visualize Per-Feature Metadata and Per-Feature Metadata Technical Reference show how to enable feature-level semantics in Cesium for Unreal to provide detailed information or apply rendering materials to features of a mesh. 

Our new VR Series for Geospatial Apps covers solutions for common challenges to building global-scale applications in VR using Cesium for Unreal. We’ve already added tutorials on Teleportation, Line Traces, and Height Correction;  Free Movement; and Vignettes to share recommended practices for VR application design and user ergonomics. Watch for more to come.

Mountain with vignette in VR

Our VR Tutorial Series for Geospatial Apps shares VR best practices for user comfort, such as creating vignettes to reduce motion sickness, in applications built with Cesium for Unreal.

CesiumJS 1.95 Release 

CesiumJS 1.95 is now available. This month we made a number of updates to get ModelExperimental up to feature parity with Model. Highlights of the release include: 

  • Memory statistics for ModelExperimental now appear in the Cesium3DTilesInspector. This includes binary metadata memory, which is not counted by Model.  #10397
  • Memory statistics for ResourceCache (used by ModelExperimental) now appear in the Cesium3DTilesInspector. #1413
  • Added support for rendering individual models and instanced tilesets in 2D / CV using ModelExperimental. #10419, #10433
  • Added modelUpAxis and modelForwardAxis constructor options to Cesium3DTileset #10439
  • Added various properties to ModelExperimental for parity with the existing Model class.  #10448, #10457, #10231, #10481, #10479, #10489, #10490, #10491
  • Updated ModelExperimental shader defaults to match glTF spec. #9992
  • ExperimentalFeatures.enableModelExperimental now enables ModelExperimental for entities and CZML in addition to 3D Tiles. #10492
  • Fixed FeatureDetection for Microsoft Edge. #10429
  • Warn if Cesium3DTile content.uri property is empty, and load empty tile. #7263
  • Updated text highlighting for code examples in documentation to support ES6+ syntax. #10051

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 1.95

Cesium for Unreal 1.15.0 Release

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

  • Removed the dependency on the Web Browser plugin and widget. Credits are now displayed using a Rich Text Block instead.
  • We now explicitly free physics mesh UVs and face remap data, reducing memory usage in the Editor and reducing pressure on the garbage collector in-game.
  • Disabling the Create Physics Mesh tileset option now works with the Chaos physics engine in addition to PhysX.
  • Fixed a potential crash when reporting tileset errors, especially when switching levels.

Check the Cesium for Unreal (UE4) release, the Cesium for Unreal (UE5) release, and the Cesium for Unreal Samples release, 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

This month we got a look at the work being done in Cesium for Unreal by V2i. They build visualizations of development projects, from planned neighborhoods to proposed highways, that allow developers to easily share the intended design. It’s a significant transformation for an industry that traditionally relies on 2D drawings for all the early stages of planning, and makes it much easier for investors, government leaders, and the public to understand proposed developments. 

Landscaping details in Cesium for Unreal

V2i visualizes planned development projects in Cesium for Unreal.