Cesium Releases in August 2025
In July, we highlighted the iTwin Activate cohort focused on Cesium and 3D Tiles, formally announced Cesium ion’s reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services, and posted the recorded sessions from the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference.
2025 Cesium Developer Conference panel: Pragmatic Approach to Open Standards.
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 1.132 release
CesiumJS 1.132 is now available. Highlights of the release include:
- Fixes incorrect polygon culling in 2D scene mode. #1552
- Fixes material flashing when changing properties. #1640, #12716
- Fixed an issue where draped imagery on tilesets was not updated based on the visibility of the imagery layer. #12742
- Fixes an exception when removing a Gaussian splat tileset from the scene primitives when it has more than one tile. #12726
- Fixes rendering of Gaussian splats when they are scaled by the glTF transform, tileset transform, or model matrix. #12721, #12718
- Fixes label background translucency issue. #12673
- Fixes Gaussian splats incorrectly rendering when
Cesium3DTileset.showis false. #12748 - Updated GPU vertex transformations to reduce precision errors. #4250
- Expand the CustomShader Sample to support real-time modification of CustomShader. #12702
- Added the ability to load a specific changeset for iTwin Mesh Exports using
ITwinData.createTilesetFromIModelId. #12778
For more details, see the changelog.
Gaussian splats model sandcastle example rendered in CesiumJS.
Cesium for Unreal 2.18.0 release
Cesium for Unreal v2.18.0 is now available. Starting with this release, Unreal Engine v5.4+ is required, and Unreal Engine v5.3 is no longer supported.
Highlights of this release include:
- Added the ability to load GeoJSON and render its lines and polygons draped over terrain or 3D Tiles. This is enabled by the new
CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlaycomponent. - Added support for querying metadata in glTF property attributes.
- Fixed a bug that caused raster overlays from Cesium ion, such as Bing Maps, to stop working after an hour or so.
Check the Cesium for Unreal release and the Cesium for Unreal Samples release for the full list of updates.
Roads in New South Wales, Australia, visualized via GeoJSON in Cesium for Unreal. Speed Zones dataset courtesy of Transport for New South Wales.
Cesium for Unity 1.17.0 release
Cesium for Unity v1.17.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:
- Added support for Cesium3DTileset tile selection using orthographic views.
- Fixed a bug that caused raster overlays from Cesium ion, such as Bing Maps, to stop working after an hour or so.
Check the Cesium for Unity changelog for the full list of updates, and follow our Cesium for Unity tutorials to get started.
An orthographic view of Center City Philadelphia, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Cesium for Unity.
Cesium ion updates
Cesium ion SaaS
- Reality modeling and analysis are available to all users as a tech preview. Share your feedback on the community forum.
- Improved rendering, scaling, and positioning of Gaussian splats.
- Update to using binary prefixes for file size abbreviations. Cesium ion has always computed sizes using base 2; this change adjusts the labeling to reflect this.
Cesium ion Self-Hosted
- Cesium ion Self-Hosted 1.7 is now available.
- The option to tile Gausian splats from the .ply format is now available to users.
- Added the ability to handle chunked asset uploads.
- The Administration panel now allows admins to undelete a user that has been marked for delete but not completely deleted yet by the maintenance script.
- The helm chart now allows users an option to delete the source directories of successful job if they please.
- The helm chart now allows users to mount their own external working directory volume in place of using scratch space on the node.
- Added support for serving WMTS format for imagery assets.
- Minor bug fixes.
Reality Tiler
- Fixed .3dtiles database output.
- Removed a spurious “file not found” warning.
- Fixed an issue where a subtree was not generated for single-tile tilesets.
Check the changelogs for the full list of updates for Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted.
A point cloud of a section of railroad after analysis with Cesium ion’s railroad detector.
Powered by Cesium
A March 2025 memo instructs United States Department of Defense (DOD) components to prioritize Other Transaction Authority agreements (OTAs) and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs) as preferred methods for acquiring software capabilities. A "non-traditional" government partner, Cesium has served Navy users via Undersea Technology Innovation Consortium (UTIC) OTA since 2019.
Dave Sracic, Distinguished Software Engineer for Fleet Signatures Systems, Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, explained: “We got [changes] back into CesiumJS, upstream, open source version, which means we do not have to keep a Navy fork of that software. The open source community maintains those specific changes. We care deeply about those features and use them heavily. Now that they’re part of the master branch, with test cases, we have reasonable confidence they won’t die, and we don’t pay some kind of sustainment fee. This is what the DOD policy aspires to—the government contributing back to open source.”
Stills from Cesium World Bathymetry video, showing possibilities of the dataset.
Stills from Cesium World Bathymetry video, showing possibilities of the dataset.