Cesium Releases in March 2024

In February we shared how to configure Vite or webpack for CesiumJS. We hope these updated examples make it easier for anyone to start using CesiumJS in their projects.

*South San Francisco, California, USA, as shown when loading the sample Vite and webpack projects in CesiumJS.*

We made improvements across Cesium this month. To get notifications about our monthly releases, you can subscribe to the Cesium release roundup thread on our community forum.

CesiumJS 1.115 Release

CesiumJS 1.115 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for I3S Building Scene Layer. #11678
Fixed a bug where the camera can stay underground when 3D Tiles are loading in. #11824
Fixed a bug where a mix of empty and non-empty tiles were not refining. #9356
Fixed an error when the screenSpaceEventHandler was destroyed before Viewer. #10576
Fixed how Camera.changed handles changes in roll. #11844
Added Scene.pickVoxel to pick individual cells from a VoxelPrimitive, and VoxelCell to report information about the picked cell. #11828

For more details, see the changelog.

Download CesiumJS 1.115

*I3S Building Scene Layer dataset from Esri visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in CesiumJS.*

Cesium for Unreal 2.4.0 Release

Cesium for Unreal v2.4.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Significantly reduced CPU memory used by glTF and raster overlay textures.
Improved texture creation performance on non-D3D platforms.
Added support for the KHR_texture_transform glTF extension—including rotation—for feature ID textures and property texture properties.
CesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent now generates nodes for KHR_texture_transform if the extension is present in a feature ID texture or property texture property.

Check the Cesium for Unreal release and the Cesium for Unreal Samples release for the full list of updates.

Download the Cesium for Unreal plugin from Epic Marketplace Download the Cesium for Unreal Samples

Cesium for Unity 1.8.0 Release

Cesium for Unity v1.8.0 is now available. This release includes several bug fixes as well as the following highlights:

Feature IDs and metadata are now parsed through the EXT_mesh_features and EXT_structural_metadata extensions respectively. Models with EXT_feature_metadata will still be parsed, but their metadata will no longer be accessible.
Added classes for accessing the contents of EXT_mesh_features and EXT_structural_metadata.
Added CesiumCartographicPolygon and CesiumPolygonRasterOverlay, which together can be used to clip out polygonal areas of a Cesium3DTileset. These new classes are available in only Unity 2022.2+ because they require Unity's Splines package.
Added materialKey to CesiumRasterOverlay, which matches the overlay to its corresponding parameters in the tileset's material. This allows for explicit ordering of raster overlays and overlay-specific effects.
Added a distance property to CesiumOriginShift, which specifies the maximum allowed distance from the current origin before it is shifted.
Added support for the KHR_texture_transform glTF extension—including rotation—in glTF material textures. The transformation is now applied on the GPU via nodes in the Material, rather than on the CPU by directly modifying texture coordinates.

Check the changelog for the full list of updates, and follow our Cesium for Unity tutorials to get started.

Download the Cesium for Unity samples

*Aerometrex Denver Photogrammetry interlaid with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with the help of polygon clipping in Cesium for Unity.*

Cesium for Omniverse 0.18.0 Release

Cesium for Omniverse v0.18.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Improved tile streaming performance by 35% by switching to UrlAssetAccessor from vsgCs.
Added support for disk tile caching, which improves streaming performance by 50% when reloading the same scene.
Added support for Web Map Service (WMS) raster overlays, Tile Map Service (TMS) raster overlays, and Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) raster overlays.
Added raster overlay options: maximumScreenSpaceError, maximumTextureSize, maximumSimultaneousTileLoads, and subTileCacheBytes.
Added ability to bypass downloading of tiles clipped by a cartographic polygon raster overlay.
Added support for globe anchors on non-georeferenced tilesets.
The movie capture tool now waits for tilesets to complete loading before it captures a frame.

See the changelog for the full list of updates, and get started with our Cesium for Omniverse tutorials.

Download the Cesium for Omniverse extension Download the Cesium for Omniverse samples

Land Zoning WMS Raster Overlay shown on Cesium World Terrain with Bing Maps Aerial imagery in Cesium for Omniverse. Courtesy NSW Department of Planning, Housing. (Licensed under CC BY 4.0.) — *Land Zoning WMS Raster Overlay shown on Cesium World Terrain with Bing Maps Aerial imagery in Cesium for Omniverse. Courtesy NSW Department of Planning, Housing.(Licensed under CC BY 4.0.)*

Cesium ion Updates

Cesium ion improved tiling this month:

Imagery tiling up to 5x faster.
Reality model tiler up to 2x faster (also includes 1.0.5 release improvements).
Terrain tiling up to 65% faster.

Powered by Cesium

In February we highlighted how the French Air Force uses Cesium for Unreal to augment helicopter training for pilots, crew members, and medics. The French Air Force Heli Lab began using Unreal Engine and Cesium for Unreal to build their own platform in 2021, and in 2022 the team formally introduced the demo. With three people working full-time on the demo, the French Air Force’s helicopter VR training went from technology readiness level (TRL) 1, an idea, to TRL 9, operations, in the span of a year. Current helicopter crew students are using the VR program as 30-50% of their training.