Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.18.0

CesiumJS 1.133

Cesium Release Roundup

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.

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 1.133 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. 

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

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. 

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

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. 

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

"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:

Added experimental support for loading 3D Tiles with Gaussian splats encoded with SPZ compression using the draft glTF extension. KHR_spz_gaussian_splats_compression in CesiumJS 1.130.1 #12582 

Added HeightReference to Cesium3DTileset.ConstructorOptions to allow clamping point features in 3D Tile vector data to terrain or 3D Tiles. #11710 

Added the ability to pass OffscreenCanvas & ImageBitmap directly to Material uniforms. #12558 

Fixed raymarching step size for cylindrical voxels. #12681 

Fixes handling of tileset modelMatrix changes for translations and rotations in GaussianSplatPrimitive. #12706 

Gaussian splats (left) compared to 3D Tiles Mesh (right) in CesiumJS. Try the Sandcastle.

Cesium for Unreal v2.17.0 is now available. This is the last release of Cesium for Unreal that will support Unreal Engine v5.3. Future versions will require Unreal Engine v5.4+.

Added a C++ and Blueprint API for loading and accessing GeoJSON data. 

Feature IDs that are encoded by UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent will now use a default null feature ID of -1 instead of 0. 

Materials generated by UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent now always check for null feature IDs, assuming a default value of –1. 

Landmarks in an area in Singapore, parsed from GeoJSON and visualized in Cesium for Unreal. Sourced from iTwin Reality Feature Service (support in progress).

Cesium for Unity v1.16.2 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed broken support for TRIANGLE_FAN primitives in tile meshes. 

Fixed an editor crash that occurred when any scale component on Cesium3DTileset was set to zero. 

Fixed a bug where CameraFlyToController, after the user interrupted a flight, would jump to the middle of the flight path immediately upon starting the next flight. 

Mesh reconstruction from photos is available as a technical preview. Upload geolocated photos and select the Photos (for 3D reconstruction) option. Read more. 

Added the ability to perform analysis on point clouds to produce classified point clouds. Try it with the Analyze button on the asset details panel. Read more. 

Gaussian splats is available as a technical preview. Upload a PLY file and enable the Gaussian splats toggle. Read more. 

Fixed a rare issue with tile subdivision that could cause unnecessarily deep tileset trees. 

Fixed an issue causing a crash for some models with no materials. 

Set the mipmap generation option to be off by default. 

Cesium ion “city detector” analysis tool as seen in Cesium Stories.

To promote the adoption of a structural health monitoring system, earthquake engineering researcher Kensaku Kaneko is pioneering a new approach—visualizing building safety through 3D web GIS with CesiumJS. 

Hobu developed its browser-based Eptium viewer using CesiumJS to enable users to visualize and interact with massive point clouds and raster data. 

Nippon Koei uses Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, significantly streamlining the acquisition and processing of accurate geospatial context for a design area. 

HNTB’s Immersive Media Solutions team uses Cesium ion, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to help community stakeholders better understand proposed infrastructure projects and engage meaningfully in the approval process. 

In May, we introduced 3D Tiles for Godot by Battle Road; explained why we use Iron Bank container images for software security in Cesium ion; attended GEOINT Symposium; announced the most recent Cesium Ecosystem Grants awardees; and turned the spotlight on the aerospace and defense, Cesium/iTwin/3DTiles, and market and education tracks at the Cesium Developer Conference. We look forward to connecting with the community at devcon in just a few weeks. (Have you registered?) 

The follow-up Cesium Ecosystem Grant to Garrett Johnson will focus on expanding the 3DTilesRendererJS project’s support for basic geospatial visualizations (topographic lines) and available data formats (TMS, QMesh) for Three.js. Pictured here is Mars.

CesiumJS 1.130 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added basic support for draping imagery on 3D Tiles. #12567 

Added support for 3D Textures, with a Volume Cloud sandcastle example. #12661. Many thanks to community contributor Hiwen for significant work on 3D Textures. 

Updated the FragmentInput struct for voxel shaders to be more consistent with other CustomShaders. #12636 

Fixed voxel rendering with orthographic cameras. #12629 

An example of draping imagery on 3D Tiles: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with Google Roadmap tiles overlay. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.16.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for TRIANGLE_FAN primitives in tile meshes. 

Worked around an Unreal Engine limitation that prevented collisions and line traces from working correctly for tilesets with a very small scale factor. 

Add a missing include for GEngine when packaging from source, introduced in v2.16.0. 

Fixed a regression from v2.16.0 that prevented the water mask from showing at closer distances. 

Fixed a bug in UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent where multiple references to same feature ID set would cause improper encoding of its feature IDs. 

Fixed a crash that would occur when duplicating an ACesiumGeoreference. 

Fixed a bug that caused tilesets to render incorrectly when Dynamic Material Instances were used for their material settings. 

Removed an unnecessary copy operation that happened while constructing tile meshes. 

Cesium for Unity v1.16.1 is now available. This release incorporates Cesium Native v0.48.0, providing fixes such as: 

Fixed a bug that prevented the Cesium ion troubleshooting window from appearing when tilesets were loaded with invalid tokens. 

Added support for mipmap generation, which is on by default. 

Improved texture quality for thin, double-sided geometry. 

Fixed an issue where some tiles could have duplicate triangles. 

Fixed an issue where geometric compression would not be applied to tilesets with a single tile. 

Reduced border erosion due to simplification. 

Fixed an issue where simplification would incorrectly handle borders.

- There are several breaking changes for configuration files:  
   - `gltf` and `tileset` options are now under `output` 
    - `csv` options are now under `input` 
    - `obj` options have been removed 

Ansys Geospatial Data Cloud integrates Cesium ion Self-Hosted and global 3D content to provide STK with out-of-the-box access to accurate geospatial context within its time-dynamic simulations. 

Boost Graphics uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to create dynamic locators of the Premier League's stadiums across the United Kingdom for a global TV audience. 

In April, we attended the 40th Space Symposium, hosted the Philly Postgres meetup and PhillyCHI UX panel, and released the full agenda for the Cesium Developer Conference. (Will we see you there?) Today we announced 3D Tiles for Godot, an open source plugin for Godot Engine built by Battle Road through the support of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant.

New York City, New York, USA, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via 3D Tiles for Godot. Courtesy Battle Road.

CesiumJS 1.129 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

VoxelProvider.minimumBounds and .maximumBounds are now specified as physical values, rather than shape space values. #12592 

Added Material with Custom GLSL Sandbox Demo. #12549 

QuadtreePrimitive.updateHeights now converts position to Cartographic before invoking the callback, ensuring compatibility with change introduced by commit 53889cb and preventing unnecessary computation. #12555 

Fixed Polyline*MaterialProperty width artifacts (reverted #12434). #12506 

New Sandcastle showing off a Material with custom GLSL shaders by user Hiwen. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.16.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added the ability to query the Cesium ion geocoder from Blueprints to resolve place names and addresses to longitude and latitude. 

Added UCesiumMetadataPickingBlueprintLibrary::FindPropertyTableProperty to search for a FCesiumPropertyTableProperty by name on a given UPrimitiveComponent. 

The request cache will now use FPaths::ProjectUserDir instead of FPaths::EngineUserDir on non-Android and non-iOS platforms, fixing a permissions issue in Development builds. 

Fixed a linking issue introduced in v2.15.0 in GoogleTilesTestSetup. 

Point cloud tiles will now be upsampled for raster overlays, fixing an issue where applying a raster overlay to a point cloud tileset would cause holes to appear. 

Fixed a crash caused by invalid I3dm headers. 

Bing Maps Aerial imagery draped on an attenuated point cloud of Mount St. Helens in Cesium for Unreal. Point cloud generated from LAS data provided by https://liblas.org.

Cesium for Unity v1.16.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added CesiumUrlTemplateRasterOverlay component, allowing a raster overlay to be added using tiles requested based on a specified URL template. 

Fixed a bug where credits would not display in the Game tab after entering Play Mode. 

Improved stability during AppDomain reloads by catching exceptions thrown while freeing tiles. 

Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Cesium for Omniverse now targets Kit 106.5. 

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

Improved tileset load times by 50% and rendering performance by 15% by reducing the number of draw calls and decreasing the amount of geometry rendered for any given view. 

Improved support for parsing sidecar files with CRS data. 

Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In 1.2.0

Added support for an elements unique ID, level, and room metadata. 

Removed unused root node project level metadata. 

Fixed crash when exporting with textures enabled and metadata disabled. 

Buendea uses Cesium Moon Terrain to support NASA’s Advanced Operations Concepts Lab (NAOCL), ensuring astronauts’ virtual training accurately reflects the lunar environments they’ll encounter when they leave home. XR Operations Support System (XOSS) is a collaboration between Buendea and NAOCL, based out of Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, USA. XOSS users have the entire Moon in their simulation and can further immerse themselves in nine potential landing and habitation sites near the lunar South Pole, where Cesium Moon Terrain has its highest resolution data and Buendea has added additional high-res surface data. 

XOSS in VR mode. Courtesy Buendea and NAOCL.

In March, we attended NVIDIA GTC 2025, presented at The Khronos Group’s “3D on the Web” during GDC 2025, and shared that the Cesium Design Tiler now preserves metadata from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) when tiling into 3D Tiles. 

We’re also hard at work on finalizing the agenda for the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.  

Color ramp shading based on an IFC length property in Cesium for Unreal. Data source: BSI (2020) "Medical-Dental Test Files," buildingSMART International—accessible via GitHub.

CesiumJS 1.128 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for loading iTwin data using share keys as an alternative to user-based OAuth. When using a share key, set ITwinPlatform.defaultShareKey. #12530 

Added Frozen.EMPTY_OBJECT and Frozen.EMPTY_ARRAY for use as default parameter values that avoid unnecessary memory allocations. #12507 

Fixed entity tracking for delayed datasource bounding spheres. #12465 

Camera.getPickRay now correctly returns a ray with origin in world coordinates in orthographic mode. #12500 

Fixed camera zooming in 3D orthographic mode when pixelRatio is not 1. #12487 

Fixed shape bounds and transforms for cylinder-shaped voxels. #12522 

Fixed an issue where clamped entities' height updates could stall when using high-resolution terrain due to a growing queue of tiles in updateHeights in QuadtreePrimitive. #12476 

Cesium for Unreal v2.15.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Actors spawned through the Cesium editor panel, such as tilesets and cartographic polygons, will now be parented to the first selected georeference—if any—instead of always being parented to the first georeference in the scene. 

WorldHeight Runtime Virtual Texture output is now set to the Z component of the world position. 

Fixed a bug where a glTF material with alphaMode=BLEND would be rendered as opaque if its baseColorFactor was not set. 

Fixed a crash that could occur when rapidly refreshing a tileset. 

Fixed a crash when tilesets with point clouds were used in combination with Hardware Ray Tracing. 

Worked around an apparent Metal problem that prevented polygon clipping from working correctly on macOS. 

Fixed normals being incorrectly written to Runtime Virtual Texture output in tangent space instead of in world space. 

When a glTF contains external resources like textures and buffers, requests for these external resources now include query parameters that were used to request the original glTF. This is important when using access tokens and similar. 

Fixed bugs that could prevent valid metadata in Instanced 3D Model (i3dm) files from being parsed correctly. 

Fixed a small memory leak while reading glTF files. 

Cesium for Unity v1.15.5 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when reloading a scene or tileset repeatedly. 

The Cesium Design Tiler now preserves metadata from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) when tiling into 3D Tiles. Metadata support includes IFC attributes, property sets, and properties. Read more. 

As part of our ongoing effort to improve performance, we are adding a "Region" field to Cesium ion. New users will be asked to set their region when setting up their account. For existing accounts, we will automatically set the region based on the locations from which data requests have been made in the past year. 

glTF node names are now preserved as metadata. 

IFC metadata attributes type detection added, no longer limited to just strings. 

fix for a regression with terrain water masks 

Blyncsy uses CesiumJS to show potential users how the company’s roadway data can be used in a visualization engine. 

The Weather Company improves military training and planning by pairing its detailed weather data with geospatial context in apps using Cesium for Unreal and CesiumJS.   

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