Cesium for Omniverse v0.26.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.21.0

CesiumJS 1.137

Cesium Release Roundup

In December, the team was in Orlando for I/ITSEC and Exton for our quarterly refactor. Then came all the jolly action with the Cesium-powered NORAD Tracks Santa app. 

Today, we opened the call for presentations for the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference. Submit your talk ideas, and we look forward to seeing you in June! 

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 1.137 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixes for positioning in workflows that delete and recreate labels. 

Fixes for texture coordinates in large billboard collections.

CesiumJS rendering a large collection of billboards with high precision, using data from the iTwin Feature Service.

Cesium for Unreal v2.22.0 is now available. Note that this release removes support for Unreal Engine 5.4; Unreal Engine 5.5 or later is required.

Other highlights of this release include:

Replaced the "Auto Fill" button on UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent with "Add Properties". This allows metadata properties and feature ID sets to be selectively added to the component, rather than adding them all in bulk. 

Added EnableDoubleSidedCollisions to ACesium3DTileset to allow intersections and collisions with geometry to also work when hitting "back" faces. 

Added an optional glTF model post-processing stage after the tile loading step to modify their models before they are displayed. 

Added support for refreshing Cesium ion login tokens after they expire and the refresh token is still valid. 

Fixed a material generation bug on UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent where user-made connections to If nodes were not preserved. 

Fixed deprecation warnings when compiling with Unreal Engine 5.5+ by replacing deprecated GetInputsView() calls with FExpressionInputIterator. 

This release also updates cesium-native from v0.55.0 to v0.56.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

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

A list of metadata properties available in the New York region of Cesium OSM Buildings.

Cesium for Unity v1.21.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Setting CesiumGeoreference.ellipsoid at runtime will now correctly update the Georeference and associated transforms. 

Fixed a bug that could cause Cesium3DTileset::Update to be called more than once per frame in the Editor. 

Further improved stability when Unity reloads the AppDomain, such as when editing scripts or entering Play mode. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.55.0 to v0.56.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in 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 v0.26.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed loading KTX2 textures with mipmaps.

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

Reduced memory usage when processing IFC files. 

Added support for nested IFC properties. 

(experimental) Added support for geospatially locating IFC exports from Archicad. 

Fixed a stack-overflow issue when processing some IFC elements on Windows. 

If an IFC property has multiple data types, the data will be cast to the most general type. 

Fixed an issue where a CRS origin could be applied incorrectly if the origin was set from the command line and also found in a sidecar file. 

Virtual City Systems uses CesiumJS to power open source 3D urban planning tools like VC Map and VC Solar, enabling scalable, interactive city modeling and analysis for municipalities. 

Engineering design and consulting firm WSB is using Cesium-powered geospatial capabilities in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect to ensure design flaws are caught early.   

In 2025, NORAD Tracks Santa turned 70. Cesium is proud to help track Santa each Christmas Eve since 2012. 

Last month we attended both FOSS4G NA and the LSAS Aerospace and Defense Workshop, where we presented and met with the community. And we’re currently at I/ITSEC! Come by to meet with our team and see demos curated specifically for the modeling, simulation, and training community.

We’ve also welcomed new team members, including Don McCurdy, creator of glTF Transform and glTF.report. We shared his recent conversation with Sean Lilley, our lead engineer behind 3D Tiles, discussing how we can advance 3D Tiles and glTF in an open ecosystem.

CesiumJS 1.136 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixed depth testing bug with billboards and labels clipping through models #13012

Billboards using imageSubRegion now render as expected. #12585

Improved scaling of SVGs in billboards #13020

Fixed unexpected outline artifacts around billboards #13038

Added scene.pickAsync for non GPU blocking picking using WebGL2 #12983

Improves performance of terrain picks via new terrain picking quadtrees #8481

This month we made performance improvements in CesiumJS for terrain picking by using a quadtree acceleration structure.

Cesium for Unreal v2.21.1 is now available. Note that this is the last release of Cesium for Unreal that will support Unreal Engine v5.4. Future versions will require Unreal Engine v5.5+.

Fixed a bug that prevented UCesiumPrimitiveFeaturesBlueprintLibrary::GetPrimitiveFeatures from retrieving the features of instanced meshes.

In addition, this release updates cesium-native from v0.54.0 to v0.55.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native.

Cesium for Unity v1.20.0 is now available. Importantly, this month we added a highly requested feature: experimental support for web builds!

Improved stability when Unity reloads the AppDomain, such as when editing scripts or entering Play mode.

Fixed incorrect association of the iOS libraries with the iOS platform, which could cause errors when packaging for other platforms.

Exceptions thrown by delegates implemented in native code are now correctly propagated back to the managed caller. Previously, this scenario could cause crashes and undefined behavior.

Delegate wrappers for native functions now use SafeHandle to ensure the native function will not be destroyed by the garbage collector while it is running.

Added Azure Maps 2D imagery assets as a Technology Preview.

Cesium ion now supports setting an asset's height for individual slides in Stories.

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

To modernize defense planning and rehearsal, VRAI used Cesium for Unreal to build the Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE), enabling users to deeply examine areas of interest before arriving. 

Forensic Rock uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to rapidly reconstruct accident scenes with high-fidelity geospatial data for legal visualizations.

Forensic Rock Accelerates Accident Reconstruction with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles

In October, we introduced Google Maps 2D Tiles in Cesium ion and had a busy month with events: Intergeo, FOSS4G Japan, AUSA, YII, ArchiFuture, and the 133rd OGC Member Meeting. This week we’re at FOSS4G NA in Reston, Virginia—join us at our talks and stop by the Cesium table to chat with the team.  

The stunning mountains of Kauai, Hawaii, visualized with Cesium World Terrain and the Google Maps 2D Satellite asset from Cesium ion.

CesiumJS 1.135 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added experimental support for loading 3D Tiles as terrain, via Cesium3DTilesTerrainProvider. See the PR for limitations on the types of 3D Tiles that can be used. #12296 

Added support for EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility glTF extension. #12765 

Improved performance of scene.drillPick (#12916), removing primitives (#3018) and terrain Quadtree handling of custom data. (#12907) 

Removed support for the KHR_spz_gaussian_splats_compression extension in favor of the latest 3D Gaussian splatting extensions for glTF, KHR_gaussian_splatting and KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz_2. Please re-tile existing Gaussian splatting 3D Tiles. #12837 

This release contained a number of community contributions, including three from user Beilinson. If you’re interested in helping too, check out our contributors guide. 

Sandcastle has been updated at https://sandcastle.cesium.com!

glTF model demonstrating the EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility extension in CesiumJS. Customization of edge colors will come in a future release.

Cesium for Unreal v2.21.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added ICesium3DTilesetLifecycleEventReceiver interface, allowing applications to receive callbacks when a material is instanced, when a tile changes visibility, when a tile is unloaded, etc. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumCreditSystem would not filter out empty credits, resulting in duplicate on-screen delimiters. 

Improved CesiumGeoJsonRasterOverlay’s support for polygons with holes and for datasets with geometry on both sides of the antimeridian. 

Infrared weather data across North America overlaid on satellite imagery from Microsoft Azure.

Cesium for Unity v1.19.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added CesiumGoogleMapTilesRasterOverlay to stream imagery from Google Maps. 

Added CesiumAzureMapsRasterOverlay to stream imagery from Microsoft Azure. 

Added assetOptions to CesiumIonRasterOverlay to pass JSON-string options to Cesium ion as it accesses an asset. 

Traffic in Philadelphia, PA, USA, visualized over a roadmap layer from Microsoft Azure alongside Cesium OSM Buildings.

Cesium ion now keeps track of which user created a story or uploaded an asset when that user is acting as a member of a Team account. 

Cesium ion now allows users to copy assets and stories between accounts to which they have access, such as from their individual Community account to a Team account. 

In Cesium Stories, added a feature to clip the terrain around a model. 

Added support for spherical harmonics when viewing Gaussian splat assets. 

Added support for tracking the creator of an asset and a story. 

Fixed an issue in reality tiler that could cause incorrect materials to be mapped to meshes when loading OBJ files. 

Fixed an issue where repositioning an asset would cause the re-archive process to fail. 

Fixed a bug with 3D Tiles imports from Microsoft Azure. 

Fixed an issue that could cause models with multiple sets of texture coordinates to be subdivided more than necessary. 

We added a feature to Cesium Stories to clip the terrain around a model.

In November 2025, we added a feature to Cesium Stories to clip the terrain around a model. 

Clip Terrain in Cesium Stories

Terradepth's AUVs collect vast amounts of 3D seabed data hosted on Cesium ion Self-Hosted and streamed to its CesiumJS-powered app, Absolute Ocean.

Glider Sim uses Cesium for Unity and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to deliver a globally immersive and highly realistic VR flight experience for both casual explorers and professional pilots.

In September, we released Cesium Mars, highlighted MicroStation’s 3D Tiles support and Cesium Native integration, and announced participants in the iTwin Activate cohort focusing on Cesium and 3D Tiles. We also attended the GeoGov Summit and welcomed Khronos members to Philadelphia for the F2F meeting. 

Cesium Mars is a 3D Tileset to enable developers, researchers, and mission planners to create visualizations and simulations of the Red Planet. 

Cesium Mars

CesiumJS 1.134 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added Google2DImageryProvider to load imagery from Google Maps. #12913 

Converted voxel raymarching to eye coordinates to fix precision issues in large datasets. #12061 

Fixed vertical misalignment of glyphs in labels with small fonts. #8474 

Fixed flickering artifact in Gaussian splat models caused by incorrect sorting results. #12662 

Sandcastle has been updated at https://sandcastle.cesium.com! The legacy Sandcastle app will remain available through November 3, 2025. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.20.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for rendering glTFs with line primitives. 

Added UCesiumGoogleMapTilesRasterOverlay. 

Added AssetOptions property to UCesiumIonRasterOverlay. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.51.0 to v0.52.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

The Google Maps attribution requirements were updated to use the "Google Maps" logo instead of the "Google" logo. Cesium ion and Cesium clients now use the Google Maps logo. If your application includes its own logic for the inclusion of the logo rather than using a logo provided by Cesium, see Google Maps' documentation for guidance about whether your application needs to be changed. 

Support for spherical harmonics for Gaussian splats. 

v1.7.1 is now available, with minor bug fixes. 

Fixed an issue that could cause incorrect materials to be mapped to meshes when loading OBJ files.

Fix export issues for some elements in Revit 2026. 

Fix incorrect transforms for some exported subcomponent elements. 

Support for Mars data added to imagery-tiler, terrain-tiler, and quantizedmeshto3dtilesconverter.

point-cloud-tiler handles PLY files with any number of comments now.

point-cloud-tiler fixed issue where in certain cases when using draco compression with .pnts output could result in batch table data not being written.

imagery-tiler added TileJSON format support.

For years, Propeller has been using CesiumJS to visualize drone-captured surveys of earthworks, quarries, mines, and waste management sites. Propeller recently got an upgrade when its team incorporated Cesium’s Design Tiler into the platform. 

For Propeller’s users, streaming IFC files as 3D Tiles means a faster, higher quality experience. They can analyze large files, like viewing cross sections of this IFC model. Courtesy Propeller.

In August, we attended SIGGRAPH, MODSIM World, TAK Offsite, and P3DL; celebrated YouthMappers’ grant-funded 3D course; and introduced iTwin Platform to Cesium developers.  

Follow the tutorials to kickstart your use of iTwin Platform with Cesium.

CesiumJS 1.133 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added Ellipsoid.MARS for use with Mars terrain and imagery. #12828 

Added spherical harmonics support for Gaussian splats, supported with the SPZ compression format. #12790 

Added support for the EXT_mesh_primitive_restart glTF extension. #12764 

Fixes issue where a Gaussian splat tileset would be rendered even if out of current camera view. #12840 

Removes the minimum tile threshold of four for WMTS. #4372 

Fixed a crash when loading PNTS (point cloud) data that contained a batch table without a binary part. #11166 

For more details, see the changelog. We also welcome your thoughts on the new version of Sandcastle.

The path of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover rendered in CesiumJS. Data courtesy NASA, European Space Agency, and the USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

Cesium for Unreal v2.19.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added assets for the IAU2015 Moon and Mars ellipsoids under Content. 

Added a missing CesiumRuntime.h include in CesiumPropertyAttribute.cpp that broke compilation in v2.18.0 on Windows. 

Fixed a bug in FCesiumVectorStyle that made polygons use the color mode from LineStyle instead of PolygonStyle. 

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when undoing and redoing deletion of a CesiumRasterOverlay component. 

Fixed a crash in UCesiumLoadGeoJsonDocumentFromIonAsyncAction that occurred when a Cesium ion server was not specified. The action will now fall back to the default ion server, similar to ACesium3DTileset. 

Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect ellipsoid parameters to be used when loading a level. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.50.0 to v0.51.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, viewed with Cesium for Unreal in Unreal Engine.

Cesium for Unity v1.18.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added option to ignore the KHR_material_unlit extension to force default lighting on tilesets. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumCreditSystem did not accurately track the loading progress of images, which could result in missing credits. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumPointCloudRenderer could dereference a null CesiumPointCloudShading on Cesium3DTileset. 

Coming soon: Cesium Mars. Stay tuned for the full announcement later this week. 

Fixed an issue with texture size estimation for tiles, which could negatively impact performance and cause tileset trees to be deeper than necessary. 

Fixed an issue that would cause some tile textures to have an invalid sampler index. 

Fixed an issue that could cause a crash or invalid material references when loading a glTF file with multiple primitives that reference the same material. 

Fixed an issue where materials would be incorrectly handled when loading multiple glTF files. 

Fixed an issue where translucent IFC materials were being considered opaque. 

Fixed an issue where an excessive number of tiles would be generated when processing nodes with a single point. 

"The most brilliant engineering designs, no matter how well crafted, remain unrealized until their vision can be clearly communicated and understood by all stakeholders," said Wayne Sullivan, visualization lead at infrastructure engineering and consulting firm Parametrix. This philosophy drives Parametrix’s Advanced Visualization team: a group of software engineers and 3D artists using Cesium for Unreal, Cesium ion, and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to enhance public outreach and help win project bids by making complex designs easier to understand. 

High-fidelity, photorealistic renderings of a proposed design helped the City of Las Vegas secure a $25 million grant for the Stewart Avenue Complete Streets project. Courtesy Parametrix.

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.

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.show is 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 

Gaussian splats model sandcastle example rendered in CesiumJS.

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.

Added the ability to load GeoJSON and render its lines and polygons draped over terrain or 3D Tiles. This is enabled by the new CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay component. 

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. 

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 v1.17.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for Cesium3DTileset tile selection using orthographic views. 

An orthographic view of Center City Philadelphia, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Cesium for Unity.

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 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. 

Removed a spurious “file not found” warning. 

Fixed an issue where a subtree was not generated for single-tile tilesets. 

A point cloud of a section of railroad after analysis with Cesium ion’s railroad detector.

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.

In June, we announced a geospatially accurate 3D Globe in QGIS supported by a Cesium Ecosystem Grant, shared our roadmap to seek your guidance as we bring iTwin digital twin capabilities to Cesium, enabled draping imagery layers on 3D Tiles in CesiumJS, and welcomed the community to Philadelphia for the first Cesium Developer Conference. 

The iconic red PSFS letters on top of the Loews Philadelphia Hotel went blue one night and green the next during the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference.

CesiumJS 1.131 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Cesium Releases in January 2026

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Cesium Releases in September 2025

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