Cesium for Omniverse v0.29.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.25.0

CesiumJS 1.144

3D Tiles

In July, we released Sandcastle Copilot, an AI-assisted chat panel built into Sandcastle so developers can create, edit, and debug CesiumJS sandcastles; introduced CAD-style workflow extensions for glTF and 3D Tiles 2.0 to deepen and enhance the ties between infrastructure and interoperability; opened a joint office with Bentley and Seequent in Tokyo as a hub for the 3D geospatial ecosystem; and posted the recorded sessions from the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference, so the community can explore ideas at any time. 

In this month’s releases, we’re continuing to advance our work on BIM and CAD support and vector data in 3D Tiles by: 

Adding support for glTF extensions across Cesium viewers to support CAD-style rendering of design models. These extensions let engineering and design models render with the fills, lines, and points they were authored with. 

Adding support for clamping lines and polygons to terrain to drape vector datasets for accurate visualization. 

Improving performance and fixing bugs to enable loading even larger design models. 

A CAD model rendered in CesiumJS with visible edges drawn without any surfaces (wireframe style).

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 1.144 is now available. Highlights of the release include: 

To improve CAD-style rendering, CesiumJS adds support for the Bentley-contributed BENTLEY_materials_planar_fill glTF extension, bringing planar polygon fill with depth sorting and coplanar ordering that keep overlapping surfaces from flickering. 

Vector rendering now supports clamping vector polylines and polygons to terrain with screen-space-constant width lines and per-feature styling through Cesium3DTileStyle. This allows massive, tiled visualization of datasets like road connectivity, rivers, and census blocks that correctly overlay on top of terrain. 

Picking of metadata from WMTS imagery providers now works when the imagery layer is draped on 3D Tiles. 

Added a new Controller framework for creating custom camera controllers. It is more configurable and composable than the preview ScreenSpaceCameraController and is designed to serve asset inspection use cases, including underground models. 

Models using the EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility extension now load with significantly less JavaScript heap (up to 19x less memory). 

2D polygons and lines draped over Cesium World Terrain.

Cesium for Unreal v2.29.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include: 

Cesium Native and Cesium for Unreal added support for the Bentley Systems point style extension, enabling rendering points as circles with varying pixel diameters via the BENTLEY_materials_points_style glTF extension. 

GeoJSON Point and MultiPoint geometry is now rasterized and visualized alongside lines and polygons when loading vector tiles, useful for marking POIs or other locations in your scenes. 

Removed support for Unreal Engine 5.5. Unreal Engine 5.6 or later is now required. 

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

Points with varying diameter, visualized in Cesium for Unreal on top of Cesium World Terrain draped with Google Maps 2D Contour imagery.

Cesium for Unity v1.25.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include: 

You can now use Cesium for Unity on Linux x86-64. 

Added support for building and running the plugin in Unity 6.5. 

Fixed a bug that prevented the Cesium ion troubleshooting window from opening for a CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay. 

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

An ion Token Troubleshooting window, opened for a GeoJSON footprint draped on Cesium World Terrain.

Available this week: reconstruct 3D reality models from photos, with technology powered by iTwin Capture. Connect with your account manager for information and access. 

We removed an internal memory limit in the design tiler that could stall tiling on complex IFC files. The trigger was hard to predict from a file's size or contents, so more of these files now tile without hanging.

RikiTraki 2.0 allows users to upload and share hikes they’ve gone on. RikiTraki has evolved alongside CesiumJS for over a decade, including improvements to performance, modularity, and scaling.  

Trillium Falls, California, USA. RikiTraki places geolocated photos from hikers’ treks at the appropriate spots on the trail. Courtesy Ricardo Morin.

At Cesium, we're passionate about working with the community to advance the intersection of computer graphics and 3D geospatial. SIGGRAPH has long been a place to connect on that work. We're excited to return this year and join the conversation in Los Angeles, California, USA, July 19-23. 

From Splats to Worlds: Advanced 3DGS Applications BOF 

Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 518 

Gaussian splatting has become one of the most exciting technologies for creating real-time, photorealistic 3D content. Join Daniel Zhong, fellow researchers, and industry experts for a discussion on bringing Gaussian splats to open standards, including the KHR_gaussian_splatting glTF extension and 3D Tiles. Presenters will also explore how hierarchical level of detail (HLOD) enables streaming geolocated, planet-scale splat scenes in real time and what's next for 4D Gaussian representations and other large-scale applications. 

Metaverse Standards Forum: 3D Assets: New Features, Tooling, and What Comes Next BOF 

Interoperable 3D assets are foundational to spatial computing, yet moving content across ecosystems remains harder than it should be. Henrik Edstrom will join industry leaders to discuss recent developments in glTF and OpenUSD, including emerging glTF 2.1 capabilities, interoperability between the two ecosystems, implementation status, and tooling. He will also highlight how 3D Tiles 2.0 builds on glTF 2.1 to enable scalable streaming of massive, semantically rich geospatial and digital twin content. 

ACM SIGGRAPH Cartographic Visualization Birds of a Feather (Carto BOF) 

Los Angeles Convention Center, Room 404 AB 

Hosted by our friend Theresa-Marie Rhyne, this session explores how computer graphics techniques can advance cartographic and geospatial visualization. Xuan Huang will present Cesium’s latest work on 3D-native vector visualization—streaming and rendering massive datasets at scale—developed as part of the 3D Tiles 2.0 open standard. The talk will highlight how the growing 3D geospatial ecosystem is delivering new capabilities to a broadening community of users.  

glTF 2.1 and Beyond: Building Interactive and Spatial 3D Experiences BOF 

Join Amanda Morgan and Sean Lilley for a look at how glTF continues to evolve for interactive and spatial 3D experiences. The session will cover the latest capabilities in glTF 2.1 and how they enable richer geospatial content, large-scale digital twins, and more immersive real-time applications. 

Cesium is proud to sponsor the Khronos Networking Reception. Wrap up the day by joining members of the Khronos community for an evening of demos, conversations, and networking. Stop by the Cesium table to meet the team, see our latest demonstrations (including a Mars rover experience), and connect with others building the future of open 3D. Please RSVP if you plan to join us. 

Don McCurdy will join Tam Belayneh from Esri to explore how glTF and 3D Tiles are enabling runtime-efficient streaming of geospatial content and digital twins. This session will cover a broad range of data types—including Gaussian splats, point clouds, vector data, volumetric data, and AEC/BIM content—and discuss how new glTF 2.1 scene capabilities support increasingly complex datasets at global scale. 

From Birds of a Feather sessions to standards discussions and community events, it's shaping up to be a busy week of learning, collaboration, and innovation. Whether you're interested in geospatial visualization and analysis, digital twins, open standards, or real-time 3D, we'd love to connect. 

If you'll be at SIGGRAPH 2026, stop by one of our sessions or say hello during the Khronos Networking Reception. See you in Los Angeles! 

As Cesium and Bentley Systems have come together to build the comprehensive open platform for the built and natural environment, we’re pairing Bentley’s deep AEC experience with interoperability to serve the community. To bring CAD-style visualization concepts to CesiumJS, our team has built a set of AEC workflow extensions to glTF, the open standard foundational to the new 3D Tiles 2.0. 

CAD users expect specific—yet common and well-established—visualization requirements, including crisp hard edges and silhouettes, lines drawn with precise widths and dash patterns, points sized to convey semantics, textures that hold a consistent on-screen scale at any zoom, and planar fills with well-defined depth and masking behavior. These are standard features in tools like Bentley’s MicroStation and other engineering design environments, and now they are coming to CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal. Many have already shipped and others are landing soon. 

Infrastructure engineers often want non-photorealistic visualizations of their designs. In CAD-oriented workflows, visualization of the edges of a surface can be as important as visualization of the surface itself. CesiumJS now supports loading and rendering CAD-style edges. 

To accomplish this, we devised new glTF specifications EXT_mesh_primitive_restart and EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility which extend the 3D Tiles format such that edge geometry can be properly embedded inside design model tilesets. 

Powered by these extensions, CesiumJS can now render surfaces with edges superimposed alongside the surfaces and just the edges (no surfaces). 

Experiment with edge display in this Sandcastle. 

Visible edges rendering in CesiumJS alongside surfaces.

The edge visibility extension encodes one edge type per triangle edge: 

silhouette is drawn only when one adjacent triangle faces the camera and the other faces away. 

hard is always drawn and represents a real sharp edge or boundary. 

repeated hard marks shared hard edges without duplicating them. 

Edge classifications encoded by the extension: hidden edges are never drawn, hard edges are always drawn, and silhouette edges are drawn only when one adjacent triangle faces the camera and the other faces away.

The edge visibility extension also supports edge-level materials and connected edge strings: 

materials defines edge materials separate from triangle surfaces or primitives, so edge appearance can be controlled independently. 

lineStrings defines connected edge segments using primitive restart (EXT_mesh_primitive_restart) for continuous outlines or edges needing different materials. 

CesiumJS introduces a dedicated edge rendering pass that decodes this visibility data, reconstructs the edges as quad-based geometry (to guarantee stable screen space widths across browsers and GPUs), and integrates them with the main surface pass using feature ID and depth comparisons to avoid z-fighting. 

For more information, check out these PRs: 

Add support for GLTF extension: EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility. 

Add EdgeDisplayMode enum for controlling edge rendering. 

CAD workflows often rely on line and point appearance to convey semantics. Line thickness and dash patterns are commonly used to differentiate boundaries, annotations, or feature classes. Point color and size can be used to highlight survey markers, control points, or other features. To accomplish this, we introduced new glTF extensions BENTLEY_materials_line_style and BENTLEY_materials_point_style, which extend the 3D Tiles format such that glTF-embedded lines and points can be styled for design model tilesets, both of which are now supported in CesiumJS. 

CesiumJS rendering edges with width and dash pattern and colorized points with a variety of diameters.

Line styling naturally works well with EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility. Edge visibility determines which edges are drawn, while line styling determines how those edges appear. Used together, edges can achieve unique styling. 

The line styling extension adds two properties to a glTF material, which apply to any line primitive or visible edge that references the material: 

width defines the thickness of the line in screen pixels, ensuring visual consistency regardless of camera distance or world scale. 

pattern defines a repeating on/off dash pattern encoded as a 16-bit unsigned integer, where each bit corresponds to one screen pixel along the line. This is compact, GPU friendly, and expressive enough to cover common CAD line styles, such as solid, dashed, and dotted lines. 

In the case of points, a single styling property is specified (color can be inferred from the material itself): 

diameter is the diameter of each point in CSS pixels. 

Constant level of detail (LOD) textures 

In many engineering and geospatial workflows, textures are used to convey representative surface detail. This can include patterns on terrain, hatching on facades, or material finishes on infrastructure. With standard UV-based texture mapping, however, those patterns don’t remain consistent across different viewing scales. Textures visually shrink as the camera zooms out and grow as it zooms in, making fine detail disappear at distance and appear unnaturally coarse up close. 

We have introduced the glTF extension EXT_textureInfo_constant_lod to support texture consistency. Using this extension, CesiumJS provides a constant LOD texture coordinate generation technique. Rather than relying on baked-in UVs, texture coordinates are computed dynamically each frame to maintain a roughly constant texel-to-pixel ratio on screen as the camera moves. Adjacent scale levels are smoothly blended so transitions between LODs do not appear sudden. 

With EXT_textureInfo_constant_lod support in CesiumJS, the texture maintains a roughly constant on-screen scale as the camera zooms, with adjacent LOD levels smoothly blended.

For the effect to look correct, glTF files need to be authored with the extension in mind. Textures should be designed to tile seamlessly, since they will repeat across surfaces at varying scales. The values baked into the extension must be chosen to match the real-world scale of the model and the expected viewing distances. This includes how often the texture repeats per meter, its offset, and the distance over which the LOD blending applies. 

Planar polygons with filled interiors are fundamental elements in many CAD workflows, where the appearance of a polygon’s interior fill can convey meaning beyond just a flat color. A filled region may need to mask out geometry behind it, sit behind a coplanar hatch pattern or text annotation, or be toggled on and off in a wireframe view. For example, a designer may superimpose some lettering as a label on a wall, expecting that the label always appears on top of the wall and be readable without any interference from the underlying wall geometry. The team created the BENTLEY_materials_planar_fill extension to support these sorts of behaviors as material-level properties within glTF. 

With BENTLEY_materials_planar_fill support in CesiumJS, the textured text (non-lines) and planar polygons exhibit no Z-fighting even though they are coplanar with the red surface (first image).

The extension is applied to a glTF material and signals two things to CesiumJS. First, it indicates that any primitive using the material is planar, so the engine can apply appropriate depth sorting. This ensures associated edges are in front of fills and planar primitives are in front of overlapping nonplanar ones. Second, it exposes a small set of properties that customize how the fill is drawn: 

wireframeFill controls if the fill is shown in a wireframe view (never, always, or only when the user has toggled fill display on). 

backgroundFill causes the fill to be drawn using the view’s background color, which is useful for creating an “invisible” polygon that masks out geometry behind it. 

behind causes the fill to be drawn behind other coplanar geometry that belongs to the same logical object, mitigating z-fighting in cases like hatch patterns over a filled polygon, text inside a filled rectangle, or line work overlaying a solid surface. 

Together, these properties give CAD applications a compact, material-driven way to describe the desired fill behaviors in CesiumJS. 

Support for BENTLEY_materials_planar_fill is upcoming in CesiumJS. 

By bringing these AEC extensions to glTF as part of 3D Tiles 2.0 and into CesiumJS, Cesium and Bentley want to empower the community with open, interoperable, best-in-class technology, benefiting the entire 3D geospatial ecosystem.   

Your input and use cases are what guide our work. Try the Sandcastle and share your feedback on the forum.  

Introducing CAD-Style Workflow Extensions for glTF and 3D Tiles 2.0 

In June, we hosted about 400 3D geospatial enthusiasts in Philadelphia for the second Cesium Developer Conference. The excitement was contagious as users and Cesium + Bentley teammates learned from each other and shared their recent work. The many Cesium product announcements included two you can read more about in blog posts from earlier this week: upcoming vector data support in 3D Tiles and expanded BIM/CAD support and metadata queries. And if you couldn’t attend devcon, are curious about sessions you missed, or want to revisit your favorite talks, the video recordings for the entire conference will be posted in a few weeks.  

Read on for recent release notes, and be on the lookout for more announcements in coming weeks, including integration of iTwin Capture into Cesium ion Self-Hosted for 3D model reconstruction from photos. 

The ionosphere was a new dedicated area at the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference for attendees to connect directly with the engineers and product teams building the tools they use every day. 

Keith Bentley (right) presented the Bentley Lifetime Achievement Award to Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite.

Panel: Standards at Scale: Building an Open, Interoperable Geospatial Ecosystem, featured a conversation among Amanda Morgan, Neil Trevett, Tam Belayneh, Ben Irwin, and Scott Simmons.

Developers, creators, and innovators from across the 3D geospatial ecosystem connected in Philadelphia for three days of learning, collaboration, and community.

Sessions spanned aerospace, defense, and simulation; product roadmaps; digital twins and AEC; and next-gen data and 3D workflows.

Social gatherings included the welcome reception, the final night party, and ad hoc hallway chats.

CesiumJS 1.143 is now available. Highlights of the release include: 

Added support for the KHR_meshopt_compression glTF extension, including the v1 attribute codec and the COLOR filter. #13553 

Added PathGraphics.materialMode. A value of "PORTIONS" allows visualizing the path in segments with different materials specified by intervals or sampling. Each segment material is determined by the material property value at the corresponding simulation time. The default value of "WHOLE" preserves existing material behavior. #13530 

Fixed a bug that caused crashes when using billboards in environments that replace Promise with custom promise implementations. #13475 

A multiphase satellite maneuver visualized in CesiumJS using colored path segments.

Cesium for Unreal v2.28.0 is now available. This is the last release that will support Unreal 5.5. Future versions will require Unreal 5.6+. Highlights of this release include: 

Fixed a crash that could occur when zooming to a tileset with Update in Editor disabled. 

Fixed Gaussian splats not rendering in Standalone Game sessions launched from the editor.  

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.61.0 to v0.62.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Cesium for Unity v1.24.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for rendering glTFs with line primitives. 

glTF line primitives visualized in Cesium for Unity.

Cesium for Omniverse v0.29.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include: 

Cesium for Omniverse now requires Kit 110.0 or above (Isaac Sim 6.0.0-dev2 or above). 

Fixed bug where polygon clipping was rendering black instead of discarding. 

Peruse 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

Users can import iModels from Bentley Infrastructure Cloud to Cesium ion to make them available for streaming as 3D Tiles.  

Users can now convert NetCDF files into 3D Tiles through the voxel tiler. 

Users can now convert GeoJSON data into 3D Tiles through the vector tiler. 

Coming soon: reconstructing 3D reality models from photos, powered by iTwin Capture technology. All of the reality modeling capabilities in Cesium ion SaaS will be available to Self-Hosted users, including the option to create Gaussian splats with LODs. Connect with your account manager to learn more. 

Tweaked IFC swept circular geometry for more consistent rotational offsets. 

Coming soon: fixing an issue where PNTS attributes could have incorrect alignment if compression was turned off. 

NTT Software Innovation Center is conducting research and development on a computing architecture referred to as the “Space Data Center.” As part of the effort to support the design and validation of this architecture, NTT is using CesiumJS.

Inter-satellite communication links visualized in a distributed network architecture. Courtesy NTT. 

One of the most frequent and long-standing requests from the community has been support for large-scale heterogenous vector data as part of 3D Tiles. We’re excited to share that we’re adding 3D-native vector points, lines, and polygons support to 3D Tiles 2.0. We’re looking for your feedback to help shape the specification and implementations.

Vector data scales quickly with geospatial datasets. Here, traffic volume is displayed on regional road network of 150,000 links (polylines) from OpenPaths transport model. Data courtesy of Atlanta Regional Council. Results do not correspond to any specific transportation planning scenario.

Vector data is widely used in architecture, engineering, construction, and operations, as seen in this 3D design model of a building with annotations, levels, and tags represented as vector data.

Before designing a solution, we conducted an extensive survey of the vector data ecosystem and of use cases, workflows, and widely adopted formats, including Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT), MapLibre Tiles (MLT), and GeoJSON.

The 3D geospatial community’s use cases have focused on 3D vector data as a gap in current solutions. Use cases such as traditional city-scale road networks with centimeter precision on terrain, highly detailed models of transmission and telecom towers overlayed with vector information, AI-extracted global-scale points of interest at accurate elevations, and 3D-specific engineering tasks like building constructions with detailed design strings and annotations—all require real-time level-of-detail streaming and high-precision 3D rendering and analytics.

There are numerous applications for vector data as 3D Tiles. Here vector data is derived by iTwin Capture AI Analysis from mobile mapping LiDAR.

Green lines mark cracks detected on the Robert Street bridge, St. Paul, Minnesota. Only a 3D-native approach to vector data can capture cracks above and beneath the bridge as seen here. Data courtesy of Collins Engineers, Inc., which leveraged drone photogrammetry and automatic crack detection to operate safer onsite, avoid traffic interruptions, and accelerate and improve bridge inspection and maintenance.

Linework display in EARTHBRAIN Smart Construction Dashboard. These proposed changes to 3D Tiles will enable better streaming and sharing of vector datasets in large, complex engineering projects.

At the same time, we've heard from the community about a plethora of use cases that are sufficiently served by existing 2D and 2.5D tiling solutions, with GeoJSON and Mapbox Vector Tiles as most commonly used solutions. Users have shared their desire to use this content in conjunction with 3D Tiles, such as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles or a user’s own high-resolution reality mesh.

As we compared the use cases to existing solutions, the current landscape is heavily 2D-focused: optimized for flat map tiles, with limited pathways to 3D, restricting both the perceptual clarity of spatial data and overall scalability. This is insufficient for the high-precision 3D use cases.

To address the need for fully-3D vector content and support existing vector data ecosystems, we are:

extending 3D Tiles to support vector data through the upcoming 3D Tiles 2.0 standard, built on glTF, and

adding runtime support for Mapbox Vector Tiles in CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal to complement the GeoJSON solution already in place, allowing users to bring their existing vector tiles into Cesium’s open-source ecosystem.

Supporting vector tiling enables efficient streaming and high-performance rendering in a true 3D, Earth-coordinate environment, all while preserving semantic-based operations like metadata querying, styling, and analysis—capabilities essential to traditional vector data use cases. Together, these additions give users an on-ramp for their existing vector workflows and a foundation for next-generation 2D and 3D vector visualization, all within a single, unified ecosystem.

Visualization from prototype: Cracks on the Robert Street bridge that extend both on the road surface and to the side curb, where a traditional 2D vector data visualization will be insufficient. Data, courtesy of Collins Engineers, Inc., is untiled GeoJSON and rendered directly in CesiumJS.

3D Tiles enable smooth streaming of global scale datasets, and support for vector data will  enable powerful streaming capability for vector datasets, too. Here, 300K points assets detected by computer vision by Blyncsy are visualized in CesiumJS.

In designing our approach to tiling vector data, we focused on meeting real community needs and explored both traditional 2D GIS and emerging 3D workflows. We spoke to users across a breadth of industries about their needs. By observing their use cases, we summarized the following initial requirements for a scalable, 3D-native vector format. These needs have informed our design.

Support 3D coordinates with graceful handling of 2D and 2.5D

Support querying and styling of per-element properties

Support 3D coordinates not referenced to Earth, e.g., Mars, Moon

Support flexible tiling schemes, e.g., quadtrees, octrees, k-d-trees, and discrete global grid systems (DGGSs), for cases where tiling schemes based on the Web Mercator projection are not suitable, like polar regions or vertical structures such as buildings or dams

High-fidelity, real-time visualization experience:

Efficient runtime deserialization using runtime-ready binary formats and GPU-ready compression

Accurate display allowing centimeter to millimeter precision, which is often required for aligning vector and non-vector (e.g., scanned) sources

Proposed 3D Tiles 2.0 specification and glTF extensions

In the upcoming 3D Tiles 2.0 specification, vector data will be natively supported by leveraging the same spatial indexing, attribute encoding, and level-of-detail organization that powers 3D meshes and point clouds today. This means users can visualize, query, and work with all of their data together in a single, unified workflow, bringing vector features into the same integrated experience their applications already rely on for 3D content.

3D Tiles will support points, lines, and polygons encoded efficiently as glTF assets. The content can be optionally compressed using Meshopt and Gzip compression for efficient storage and streaming. The proposed specification consists of one new 3D Tiles extension and two proposed glTF extensions:

3DTILES_content_gltf_vector (3D Tiles extension): Identifies tile contents as “vector data,” and informs runtimes on how to interpret that data. Enables vector support in 3D Tiles 1.1, with an equivalent extension planned for 3D Tiles 2.0 soon.

KHR_mesh_primitive_restart (glTF extension): Enables more efficient encoding of LINE_STRIP and LINE_LOOP topology in glTF, used in line and polygon data.

EXT_mesh_polygon (glTF extension): Provides a backwards-compatible representation of polygons for glTF, preserving polygon topology while including runtime-ready triangulation data for high-performance rendering.

glTF extensions including EXT_mesh_features and EXT_structural_metadata will also be used for vector tiles content to encode Feature IDs, properties, and metadata.

Looking Ahead: Cesium's Vector Tiles Roadmap

A high-level overview of vector data workflow for Cesium.

Our work on 3D Tiles specifications is always backed by reference implementations proving the approach and performance and addressing the use cases. We have started implementations for tiling massive vector data and LOD-enabled high-fidelity rendering in CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal.

The pipeline for vector content in Cesium will consist of three key parts:

An optimized tiling pipeline to create 3D Tiles from vector data, with GeoJSON as the initial input format. As with our existing pipelines, the vector tiling capability will be available both via Cesium ion and for self-hosted services. Additional formats such as GeoPackage, shapefiles, and more will be supported based on community feedback.

glTF for optimized vector tile encoding, streaming, and rendering.

Runtime vector support in CesiumJS, Cesium Native, and Cesium for Unreal, with additional runtimes like Cesium for Unity based on community feedback.

Aiming for a full end-to-end pipeline in the first phase, we have begun with support for GeoJSON as the initial input format. The support includes commercial tiling, hosting, and streaming services in Cesium ion, with runtime support in CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal. We have also begun supporting Mapbox Vector Tiles in CesiumJS, which will reuse the same rendering pipelines as 3D Tiles, thus benefitting performance improvements.

In the coming months, we will extend styling support, support 3D Tiles and terrain clamping, add more source formats for all our runtimes, and continue performance and robustness improvements.

Visualization from prototype: A 3D design for a hypothetical highway in Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia as vector tiles, tiled into 3 LODs and produced by Bentley. The geometry carries real elevation values — the road structures are positioned in true 3D space.

Vector data as 3D Tiles: highway design

Visualization from prototype: New York City building footprints represent the full perimeter outline of each building as viewed from directly above. Tiled with 13 LODs. Styling of the polygon as blue and dashed outlines is done at runtime.

Vector data as 3D Tiles: NYC Building footprints

These reference implementations are intended to seed your testing and feedback to align the specification and roadmap to address your use-cases.  

We look forward to collaborating with the community to finalize vector data support in 3D Tiles 2.0 and implementations in Cesium. We need your input to solidify the specification and test the implementation. Please share your use case and observations in the Cesium community forum. We’d love to hear about how you plan to build applications with vector tiles.  

Help Shape Vector Data Support in 3D Tiles

In May, we attended GEOINT Symposium in Aurora, Colorado, USA, and OGC Builder Days in London, UK.  

We’re ramping up to this year’s Cesium Developer Conference—next week!—June 8-10 in Philadelphia. Have you registered to join us? Tracks include Aerospace, Defense, and Simulation; Cesium Core: Product Roadmaps and Advanced Technologies; Digital Twins and AEC Innovation; and Next-Gen Data and 3D Workflows. Learn about 3D Tiles 2.0, vector data, voxels, design review, sensor fusion, emergency management, synthetic training environments, Mars, and more. We look forward to connecting with you at the pre-conference workshops, in the ionosphere, during talks, 1:1, and at receptions, to shape the future of open geospatial together.

Join us for the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference next week.

CesiumJS 1.142 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Rendering support for vector tiles from 3D Tiles generated by the Cesium ion vector tiles technology preview. Includes support for 3D points, lines, and polygons, with property-based styling and picking. Includes 3DTILES_content_gltf_vector extension for 3D Tiles, and KHR_mesh_primitive_restart and EXT_mesh_primitive extensions for glTF. For more information, see 3d-tiles#825. #13478 

Sandcastle now ships with Cesium Copilot, an in-app AI coding assistant that writes, edits, and debugs CesiumJS code in the same panel as the live preview. Users bring their own keys for Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, or Google Vertex AI; the assistant edits the JavaScript and HTML buffers through a structured apply_diff tool, streams thinking and tool calls live, and can self-fix runtime errors without a manual round-trip. #13188 

Added GeoJsonPrimitive for loading GeoJSON directly into BufferPrimitiveCollections, bypassing the entity/DataSource layer for significantly improved performance with large datasets. #13505 

Added MVTDataProvider for loading Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) directly into CesiumJS as 3D Tiles. Supports per-feature styling via Cesium3DTileStyle, feature picking with metadata (getProperty), and automatic property table encoding via EXT_structural_metadata. #13404 

- BufferPrimitiveCollection improvements: 
    - Added `boundingVolume` constructor parameter to `BufferPointCollection`, `BufferPolylineCollection`, and `BufferPolygonCollection`. For larger animated collections, providing a precomputed bounding volume can eliminate the performance cost of automatically updating the bounding volume frequently. [#13477](https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/pull/13477) 
    - `boundingVolume` property is now defined in world space, not local/model space. [#13477](https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/pull/13477)  
    - Added `.blendOption` constructor parameter to BufferPrimitiveCollection. 
    - Added `BufferPrimitiveMaterial#color.alpha`. [#13384](https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/pull/13384)
    - Added `BufferPointMaterial#outlineColor.alpha`. [#13384](https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/pull/13384) 
    - Fixed a bug causing `BufferPointCollection` to not update after changes to point positions. [#13465](https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/pull/13465) 

Added support for multiple key modifiers in ScreenSpaceEventHandler.setInputAction. #13307 

Added EdgeDisplayMode enum and edgeDisplayMode property to Model and Cesium3DTileset for controlling how edges from the EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility glTF extension are rendered. Supports three modes: SURFACES_ONLY, SURFACES_AND_EDGES, and EDGES_ONLY (CAD-style wireframe rendering). #13192 

3D vector tiles in CesiumJS visualizing building footprints categorized by construction year in New York City, viewed in Cesium Sandcastle.

Cesium for Unreal v2.27.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added CesiumVectorTilesRasterOverlay supporting vector data loaded from 3D Tiles tilesets. 

Added support for displaying points in CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay and CesiumVectorTilesRasterOverlay. 

Added support for rendering edges from the EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility extension. 

Added missing includes that introduced compilation failures when building the plugin from source against UE 5.7's bundled clang 20.1.8 toolchain (introduced in v2.25.0 by #1685; binary plugin users were unaffected). 

Fixed the case where glTF line primitives caused excessive log spam due to Chaos attempting to generate physics bodies for small non-triangle meshes. 

Fixed an incorrect transform that reversed the appearance of data in box voxel tilesets. 

Fixed a crash in UCesiumGaussianSplatSubsystem::Tick when GetPrimaryWorld() returns nullptr (e.g., between PIE shutdown and Standalone-Game launch, or on nDisplay secondary nodes during world bind-up). Restores the validity check ordering that shipped in v2.24.1 and was inadvertently inverted in v2.26.0 (#1841). 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.60.0 to v0.61.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

New York City building footprints tiled as 3D Tiles through Cesium ion, streamed in Cesium for Unreal using the new vector tiles raster overlay. 

Cesium for Unity v1.23.3 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

The native Android library (libCesiumForUnityNative.so) is now built with 16 KB ELF segment alignment, enabling compatibility with Android 15+ devices that use 16 KB memory pages. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.60.0 to v0.61.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native.  

**Cesium ion SaaS**
- Cesium ion no longer requires mesh generation for reconstruction workflows, enabling point cloud-only and Gaussian splat-only jobs to run through the reconstruction pipeline. 
- Coming this week: expanded support for design model formats, making it easier than ever to bring engineering, architecture, and infrastructure data into 3D Tiles to stream anywhere. 
- Model tiler will be retired from Cesium ion on September 1, 2026. It will no longer be available through the Cesium ion user interface or API. Other tilers produce better results for the file formats supported and output 3D Tiles 1.1. This tiler outputs 3D Tiles 1.0. 

**Vector tiler** 
- Coming this week: support for tiling large .geojson files via the new vector tiler technology preview.

**Voxel tiler**
- Coming this week: support for tiling large NetCDF files via the new voxel tiler technology preview. 

The Cross Product built TCP Studio to visualize and analyze large LiDAR datasets for linear infrastructure, using CesiumJS and Cesium ion to stream 3D Tiles at scale. 

Cesium Releases in August 2026

Cesium at SIGGRAPH 2026

Introducing CAD-Style Workflow Extensions for glTF and 3D Tiles 2.0

Cesium Releases in July 2026

Help Shape Vector Data Support in 3D Tiles

Cesium Releases in June 2026

The Cross Product Transforms Raw LiDAR Data into Actionable Infrastructure Insights with Cesium