Cesium for Omniverse v0.24.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.13.1

CesiumJS 1.123

Cesium Release Roundup

In October, we discussed our collaborations with Esri, highlighted AERO AI’s work on reintegrating WebODM with Cesium ion, shared progress on the Cesium Revit Add-In, introduced Japan Regional Terrain and updates to Japan 3D Buildings, dove into how to become a Cesium Certified Developer in Japanese, and explained key updates to glTF rendering 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 1.123 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Updated default 3D Tiles and Model lighting when using PBR in order to create a more realistic appearance. #12129

Added ScreenSpaceCameraController.maximumTiltAngle to limit how much the camera can tilt. #12169 by new contributor albek446

Updated Japan Buildings sandcastle to use Japan Regional Terrain. #12259

Moved Viewer functionality to CesiumWidget to increase usability. Makes the CesiumWidget closer to a drop in replacement for the Viewer when not utilizing the extra Viewer widgets. #11967.

Fixed flickering issue caused by bounding sphere retrieval being blocked by the bounding sphere of another entity. #12230

Updates to default 3D Tiles and Model lighting when using PBR create a more realistic appearance.

Cesium for Unreal v2.10.0 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added a shared assets system that ensures external images referenced by different glTFs will only be loaded once per image. Previously, these images would be loaded again for each glTF that referenced them. This significantly reduces memory usage for tilesets that reuse the same textures.

Added CircumscribedGroundHeight property to CesiumSunSky. It defaults to 0, which is consistent with the previous behavior. It can be set to a larger value (like 40) to avoid dark splotchy artifacts when zoomed out far from the globe in certain tilesets where geometry extends very far beyond the ellipsoid in the low-detail representation, such as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

Fixed a bug that caused incorrect lighting for tilesets using KHR_materials_unlit.

Reduced the memory used by tiles with KHR_materials_unlit.

CesiumGlobeAnchor properties are no longer shown on the main CesiumSunSky Details panel, because it is almost never necessary to set these. They can still be set on the component's own Details panel if needed.

Fixed error messages in the Unreal log about uninitialized fields in FCesiumSampleHeightResult.

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

Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles captured from an outer space view, after improvements to its generated normals and surrounding atmosphere.

Cesium for Unity v1.13.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added restrictions to CesiumRuntime.asmdef to prevent the plugin from attempting to load on platforms not supported by Cesium Native.

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

Cesium for Omniverse v0.24.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed bug where smooth normals setting would crash.

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

Japan Regional Terrain is now available in the Cesium ion Asset Depot. Details are in this blog post.

Japan 3D Buildings includes updated building heights and additional bridge features.

Available soon: adding annotations to Cesium Stories. Look for an announcement on the community forum and let us know what you think!

An improved Asset Server is now available. 

The Asset Server allows users to serve Cesium data like Cesium World Terrain, their own data, and other data in environments where Cesium ion Self-Hosted is not deployed. It’s included in subscriptions for Cesium ion Self-Hosted and data like Cesium World Terrain. If you license Cesium content and received an Asset Server from Cesium before September 2024, we recommend upgrading to this newer server. The Asset Server is available on the Downloads page now for current Cesium ion Self-Hosted users; it will soon be downloadable by users with a subscription to Cesium data. If you’d like to access it sooner, please contact your account team.

File watchers that update the content and cache as source files change

Check the changelogs for the full list of updates for Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

“Reentry” blends a game with a simulator, so users learn to operate spacecraft with realistic procedures and, soon, Cesium Moon Terrain. Within a few hours of hearing about Cesium Moon Terrain, creator Petri Wilhelmsen began incorporating it into Reentry via Cesium ion and Cesium for Unity. Wilhelmsen reports it took only 30 minutes to replace his lower fidelity Moon with Cesium Moon Terrain.

The Lunar Module preparing for descent and landing on the lunar surface. Courtesy Petri Wilhelmsen.

In September, we introduced the AECO Tech Preview Program, highlighted our summer Refactor, shared that we’ve joined Bentley Systems, featured enhancements to the Three.js 3D Tiles renderer, and announced grant support for the Cesium plugin for Godot.

Visualization of structural metadata and mesh features from 3D Tiles 1.1 is now possible in Three.js with the San Francisco Ferry Building.

CesiumJS 1.122 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added CallbackPositionProperty to allow lazy entity position evaluation. #12170 by new contributor jfayot

Added enableVerticalExaggeration option to models. Set this value to false to prevent model exaggeration when Scene.verticalExaggeration is set to a value other than 1.0. #12141 by new contributor timeichfeld-msa

Fix Texture errors when using a HTMLVideoElement. #12219

Fixed noise in ambient occlusion post process. #12201

The new CallbackPositionProperty allows Entities to lazily evaluate a position. Here, it’s used to track a drone flying through the Grand Canyon, as visualized using Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

Cesium for Unreal v2.9.0 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added SampleHeightMostDetailed function to Cesium3DTileset, which asynchronously queries the height of a tileset at a list of positions. It is callable from both C++ and Blueprints.

Drastically reduced tile mesh memory usage in UE 5.3 and 5.4 by working around a bug that causes those engine versions to add more texture coordinate sets than necessary.

Fixed a bug where the scale, noData, and default values of a property in EXT_strutural_metadata were not correctly passed to the tileset's material.

Trees and rocks floating above Cesium World Terrain, with lines drawn to where they would fall on the hills below them.

The same trees and rocks placed on the terrain using SampleTerrainMostDetailed. Assets provided by Quixel Megascans.

Cesium for Unity v1.13.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added a new CesiumCameraManager component. It allows configuration of the cameras to use for Cesium3DTileset culling and level-of-detail.

Added SampleHeightMostDetailed method to Cesium3DTileset. It asynchronously queries the height of a tileset at a list of positions.

Fixed a bug that could cause a NullReferenceException when a Cesium3DTileset was not nested into a game object with a CesiumGeoreference.

Use the new Cesium Camera Manager component to control which cameras are used for 3D Tiles culling and level-of-detail.

Cesium for Omniverse v0.23.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed bug where tilesets and raster overlays were not being passed the correct custom ellipsoid.

Fixed rendering base color textures that contain an alpha channel.

The Cesium ion Reality Tiler was updated with performance improvements.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted 1.4 will be released this week. Highlights will include:

CRS option availability for reality tiler and the point cloud tiler command line interface.

Linking to individual Cesium Stories slides.

Duplicating Cesium Stories and Cesium Stories slides.

Pennoni is moving engineering from graph paper to streaming 3D models with Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Pennoni’s engineers, with collaborating architects, create 3D models for proposed structures using CAD data, point clouds, or photogrammetry. Pennoni loads these directly into Unreal Engine, ensuring accurate placement and lighting with Cesium for Unreal, and streams Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Cesium ion for real-world urban context, so the future view is clear.

Proposed “dolphin” cylinder protection at Delaware River and Bay Authority (DRBA)’s Delaware Memorial Bridge. Courtesy Pennoni.

In August, we explained more about the Cesium Certified Developer process, highlighted Cesium ion Self-Hosted updates, shed light on Cesium ion architecture (parts 1 and 2), launched Cesium Moon Terrain, did a deep dive into our GitHub Actions workflow, explored 3D models of early civilizations with UNICiv, and shared our SIGGRAPH trip report.

Add Cesium Moon Terrain to your Asset Library from the Cesium ion Asset Depot.

CesiumJS 1.121 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Enable MSAA by default with 4 samples. This smooths jagged edges for increased visual realism. #12158

Switched the default (non-HDR) tonemapping for models, atmosphere, and globe from ACES to PBR Neutral Tonemap from Khronos. This widens the gamut of possible colors and provides more consistent color appearances across renderers. #12160

Expose the tonemapper and exposure properties of PostProcessStageCollection to allow changing the tonemap used when HDR is turned on. This defaults to the PBR Neutral Tonemap from Khronos. #12160

Added WaterMask globe material, which visualizes areas of water or land based on the terrain's water mask. #12149

Fixed several bugs with PBR lighting for more realistic rendering. #12100, #12116, and #12118

Googleplex, Mountain View, California, USA, as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles without HDR or MSAA.

Googleplex, Mountain View, California, USA, as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with HDR and MSAA on.

Cesium for Unreal v2.8.0 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added universal (Intel and Apple Silicon) binaries for Unreal Engine 5.2. Unreal Engine 5.3 and 5.4 already had universal binaries.

Raster overlays now have bAllowAnyoneToDestroyMe set to true by default. This allows them to be dynamically removed and destroyed at runtime via the Blueprint Destroy Component function called from anywhere, including Level Blueprints. Previously, attempting to delete a raster overlay from outside the Actor would result in an error.

Fixed a bug introduced in the previous release that caused instanced tilesets to render incorrectly.

Debug sections are no longer compressed on Linux and Android, improving compatibility.

Fixed a bug where calling Refresh on a CesiumRasterOverlay would cause the overlay to appear on the Cesium3DTileset, even if inactive.

Cesium for Unity v1.12.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Editor and Player builds both now require macOS 10.15+. Previously, 10.13 was supported for Players, and 12.7+ was required for the Editor.

Added originPlacement property to CesiumGeoreference to toggle between "Cartographic Origin" and "True Origin" reference modes. Whereas "Cartographic Origin" is the default for georeferenced tilesets, "True Origin" may be used for non-georeferenced tilesets centered at the origin.

Fixed a bug that prevented using the Token panel with a new Cesium ion Server that had never had its token set before.

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash in CesiumIonSession when the object was garbage collected or the AppDomain was unloaded while network requests were in progress.

Fixed a bug that could cause CesiumFlyToController to unexpectedly interrupt a flight.

Fixed a bug that prevented clipping with CesiumCartographicPolygon from working with HDRP.

Cesium for Omniverse v0.22.0 is available. 

The extension now supports using non-WGS84 ellipsoids. A CesiumEllipsoidPrim should be specified on the ellipsoidBinding field of a CesiumReferencePrim.

Yesterday we announced a new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In, available for early access and feedback via our AECO Tech Preview Program. These tools transform IFC and Revit files into 3D Tiles. Read more here.

Cesium Moon Terrain, the first readily accessible single, comprehensive 3D Tileset of the Moon, is now available. More details are on our blog.

You can link directly to a specific slide in Cesium Stories. The viewer and editor URLs include hash references to each slide’s ID, so they remember exactly which slide you’re on. See the forum post for more info.

Create copies of your existing Cesium Stories or individual slides, to use your current content instead of starting from scratch. This forum post has details.

Autodesk Snowdon Towers sample data exported directly from Revit as 3D Tiles including structural and MEP content, full interior detail, and per-feature metadata streamed into Unreal with Cesium. Data courtesy of Autodesk.  

The Lockheed Martin AI Center’s (LAIC) Joint Activity Manager (JAM) provides operational context for active wildland fires, using AI, real-time data, and CesiumJS to stream this 3D visualization to incident commanders. While still in development, this capability is intended for state agencies to visualize and analyze active wildland fires; track flights of aerial assets that have been tasked with detection, monitoring, and suppression; and incorporate weather information, such as temperature, humidity, and wind.

Wind and weather information for an active fire area in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

In July, we opened applications for this quarter’s Cesium Ecosystem Grants, welcomed new teammates, and attended SIGGRAPH 2024.

CesiumJS 1.120 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added Transforms.computeIcrfToMoonFixedMatrix and Transforms.computeMoonFixedToIcrfMatrix to compute the transformations between the Moon's fixed frame and ICRF at a given time.

Added Transforms.computeIcrfToCentralBodyFixedMatrix to specify the default ICRF to fixed frame transformation to use internally, including for lighting calculations.

Added SplitDirection property for display PointPrimitive and Billboard relative to the Scene.splitPosition. #11982

Fixed environment map LOD selection in image-based lighting. #12070

Corrected calculation of diffuse component in image-based lighting. #12082

Updated specular BRDF for image-based lighting. #12083

The Anisotropy Barn Lamp sample model rendered in CesiumJS, highlighting recent improvements to image-based lighting.

Cesium for Unreal v2.7.1 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Improved collision and line tracing against tilesets by working around an overly aggressive degenerate triangle check in the Chaos physics engine.

Fixed a bug that could cause a bad_any_cast exception when trying to access glTF extensions on non-Windows platforms. This commonly popped up when loading tilesets with metadata.

Fixed a bug that caused the GetInteger64 functions on CesiumMetadataValue, CesiumPropertyArray, and CesiumPropertyTableProperty to always return the default value on non-Windows platforms.

Fixed issue with UCesiumGlobeAnchorComponent::GetEllipsoid that caused compilation errors on some machines.

Cesium for Unity v1.11.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed a bug that caused a NullReferenceException when attempting to get or set the longitudeLatitudeHeight property on a disabled CesiumGlobeAnchor.

Fixed a bug introduced in v1.11.0 that caused CesiumCartographicPolygon positions to be interpreted incorrectly, making polygon clipping unusable.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted v1.3 will be posted to our Downloads page within the week. Highlights of this release include:

Capability for Cesium ion Self-Hosted users to include Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Bing imagery in their workflows and applications by connecting a Cesium ion Self-Hosted account and a Cesium ion SaaS account.

Capability for geocoding when Cesium ion Self-Hosted is connected to a Cesium ion SaaS account.

Bash scripts for running the tiling pipeline via command line as an alternative to running it in Docker. Docker is still required. 

Check the changelog for the full list of updates for Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Drip visual’s PublicTwin is an online platform enabling citizen input with Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Cesium for Unreal.

Working in the deep waters of the Pacific, Ocean Exploration Trust uses Cesium for Unreal for its Realtime Underwater Modeling and Immersion (RUMI) project.

NBC Sports, the official American broadcast partner of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, is using Cesium to visualize event locations.

In June, we released the Japan 3D Buildings tileset in Cesium ion, passed the 10 million mark for total lifetime downloads of CesiumJS, announced a new set of Cesium Ecosystem Grant recipients, and shared that Vexcel 3D Cities are now available via Cesium ion Self-Hosted. At the end of July, we’ll be in Denver for SIGGRAPH 2024—let us know if you’ll be there!

CesiumJS 1.119 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added Ellipsoid.default to allow a central place to specify a default ellipsoid value to be used throughout the API where an ellipsoid is not otherwise specified. #4245

Various defaults have been updated to adjust when Ellipsoid.default is changed to a value other than the WGS84 ellipsoid.

Fixed diffuse color calculation for PBR materials. Many models will now appear slightly brighter. #12043

Fixed the calculation of base color in materials using the KHR_materials_specular extension. #12041

Adjusted spacing for on screen Credits and updated recommendations for positioning custom ones. #11912

PBR material glTF sample model, showcasing auto paint using the recently supported glTF extensions.

Cesium for Unreal v2.7.0 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for custom non-WGS84 ellipsoids.

Fixed a bug in CesiumCartographicRasterOverlay where small tiles would not be excluded.

Fixed a bug in CesiumCartographicRasterOverlay that could cause pieces of tiles to appear inside the excluded region.

Removed an unnecessary alpha check when selecting translucent base materials.

Cesium for Unity v1.11.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed a bug that caused Cesium ion tokens to fail to save when selected through the Token panel.

Cesium for Unity no longer requires the MSVC runtime library redistributable to be installed.

Reality Tiler v2.0.0 is now available, with significant performance improvements for large models.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted v1.2 is now available, including clipping support, importing from and exporting to S3, and additional enhancements and bug fixes.

Vexcel 3D Cities data now available for Cesium ion Self-Hosted: offline access to high fidelity 3D data. Learn more here.

Contact us to add Vexcel 3D Cities data to your Cesium ion Self-Hosted deployments

Vexcel 3D Cities data of New York City, New York, USA.

In May, we announced Cesium ion’s clipping feature; highlighted using those clips with Unreal Engine for Fortnite, Blender, and Adobe After Effects; and shared how to selectively hide regions of either 3D tilesets or terrain in CesiumJS with ClippingPolygons. Today we released the Japan 3D Buildings tileset on Cesium ion; you can learn more in this blog.

Use a 3D Tiles clip from Cesium ion to create geospatial context in an Unreal Editor project. Sketchfab model of Pivotal Point by hamma085, CC BY 4.0.

CesiumJS 1.118 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for glTF models with the KHR_materials_specular extension. #11970

Added support for glTF models with the KHR_materials_anisotropy extension. #11988

Added support for glTF models with the KHR_materials_clearcoat extension. #12006

Fixed a bug where scene.pickPosition returned incorrect results against the globe when depthTestAgainstTerrain is false. #4368

Fixed an error in the specular reflection calculations for image-based lighting from supplied environment maps. #12008

A demonstration of the KHR_materials_clearcoat extension. Model source: glTF Sample Assets, CC0 1.0.

Cesium for Unreal v2.6.0 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for Instanced 3D Meshes (I3DM) and the glTF EXT_mesh_gpu_instancing extension.

Improved DynamicPawn movement by interpolating to its intended speed. This provides smoother movement over areas with large height variation, e.g., when flying over buildings in a city.

Fixed an issue with pixel dithering artifacts that could appear on tilesets.

Fixed an issue where DynamicPawn could get stuck after interrupting a flight from UCesiumFlyToComponent.

Fixed a bug where CesiumTileMapServiceRasterOverlay, CesiumWebMapServiceRasterOverlay, and CesiumWebMapTileServiceRasterOverlay would attempt to load empty URLs.

Fixed a bug that caused some textures shared between multiple glTF primitives to be missing entirely.

Fixed a bug that caused tilesets to fail to load with the "Experimental Occlusion Culling Feature" enabled.

Fixed a problem that could cause linker errors when packaging a game using both Cesium for Unreal and the Pixel Streaming plugin in Unreal Engine 5.4.

Cesium for Unity v1.10.1 is now available. This release updates cesium-native from v0.35.0 to v0.36.0. See the cesium-native changelog for a complete list of those changes.

Cesium for Omniverse v0.21.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added pointSize attribute to CesiumTilesetPrim for controlling the size of points.

Added read-only attribute ecefToUsdTransform to CesiumGeoreferencePrim. Previously this was stored in /CesiumSession, which has since been removed.

Fixed crash when updating globe anchor when georeferencing is disabled.

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

~10 billion-point point cloud 3D Tileset of the City of Montreal visualized with Cesium for Omniverse. Source: LiDAR aérien 2015, CC BY 4.0.

You can now download 3D geospatial data as 3D Tiles or glTF to add real-world context to streaming or disconnected applications with Cesium ion’s clipping feature, also known as “clip and ship.”

Significant improvements to the CityGML and KML/COLLADA tiling pipelines on Cesium ion, including KTX2 texture compression, CityGML tiling performance when tiling multiple files across multiple cores, the buildings tiler now taking hundreds of thousands of files as input all at once, and more. Details are here.

A new tileset is available on Cesium ion, Japan 3D Buildings, which is countrywide, open source 3D building data from over 200 locations across Japan. Learn more about this tileset here.

Contact us to learn about using Cesium's 3D Tiling Pipeline in your own environment

To derive additional value from digital twins, Brightline Interactive’s SpatialCore platform pairs AI and the Cesium for Omniverse extension for spatial computing, empowering enterprise and public sector users to combine massive datasets and perform complex calculations.

Moritz Cermann’s Cesium-based application won the Best of Entertainment and Events category in the Google Immersive Geospatial Challenge.

Google Immersive Geospatial Challenge Winner Becomes Cesium Certified Developer

New Ascent introduces students to the space industry by launching “ChipSats” to gather environmental info and tracking their descent in 3D as part of MISSION: SubSpace, an in-classroom aerospace mission experience that uses an interactive web portal built on CesiumJS.

In April, we reopened applications for Cesium Ecosystem Grants, shared the continuation of our work with Maxar Intelligence on the US Army’s One World Terrain contract, announced Cesium ion’s Sketchfab integration, and recapped our time at NVIDIA GTC 2024. The team will be at GEOINT Symposium next week—meet us in BOOTH 1831.

Sketchfab assets available in Cesium ion: Singapore's famous Helix Bridge is placed across the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and visualized with Unreal Engine. Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles provide broader geospatial context. Sketchfab model: Helix Bridge by Sengchor with CC Attribution.

CesiumJS 1.117 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added ClippingPolygon and ClippingPolygonCollection for applying multiple clipping regions, with support for concave regions and inverse clipping regions, to 3D Tiles and Terrain. #11750

Fixed a bug that Label position height may not be correctly updated when its HeightReference is relative. #11929

Fixed a bug where a data source was not automatically rendered after it was added in request render mode. #11934

For more details, see the changelog.

A roadway design model outside of Brisbane, Australia, inset into Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles using a clipping polygon in CesiumJS.

Cesium for Unreal v2.5.0 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for Cesium ion servers in single user mode. Tokens are not required to stream assets from such servers.

Fixed an issue where tilesets would render completely black on Quest headsets and some iOS devices.

Fixed a crash on Unreal Editor shutdown that would occasionally happen due to attempts to access garbage-collected static classes.

Cesium for Unity v1.10.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed a bug where CesiumCreditSystem would delete itself from its scene when other additive scenes were unloaded.

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.34.0 to v0.35.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native.

Cesium for Omniverse v0.20.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed missing button for adding imagery from Asset UI.

Updated cesium-native, which includes a bug fix for reading GLB files with extra padding bytes.

Sketchfab model of Monteriggioni imported via Cesium ion, placed on Cesium World Terrain with Bing Imagery, and visualized with Cesium for Omniverse. Sketchfab model: Monteriggioni: HIGH quality by omnidirectional with CC Attribution.

You can now import 3D models from Sketchfab into Cesium ion to create 3D Tiles, making it easier to create context and content for geospatial experiences. Details are here.

Cesium’s 3D Tiling Pipeline v4.7.1 is now available and includes Point Cloud Tiler fixes: 

When reading from LAZ files, it now correctly uses the extended data fields for classification and point_source_id. Previously this resulted in these fields being zero in some cases.

Cesium Releases in November 2024

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