Cesium for Omniverse v0.29.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.25.1

CesiumJS 1.145

CesiumJS

Space missions are complex to plan, execute, and communicate to audiences with varying knowledge and interests. To retain engineering accuracy while bringing charts and strings of numbers to life, Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon uses CesiumJS for mission plans and milestones. 

Views in Event Horizon seamlessly transition from Earth centric to Moon centric—and beyond—to meet the needs of complex storytelling. Courtesy Blacknight Space.

Space missions are complex to plan, execute, and communicate to audiences with varying knowledge and interests. To retain engineering accuracy while bringing charts and strings of numbers to life, Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon uses CesiumJS for mission plans and milestones.

Blacknight Space Event Horizon

Event Horizon is an interactive, browser-based 3D mission visualization platform, designed for space operators, engineers, and technical marketers to deliver a dynamic showcase of mission plans and milestones. Teams can confirm trajectories, review events, and educate stakeholders and the public.  The application was recently released as an early beta version.

Blacknight Space supports commercial aerospace companies and US defense organizations, aiming to make the industry dramatically more efficient through digital engineering solutions. Blacknight is an Ansys partner for Digital Mission Engineering and shares AGI heritage with Cesium, championing tools for simulations in challenging environments. 

“Cesium technology is part of our DNA,” said Nate McBee, VP of product and engineering at Blacknight Space.

An Event Horizon overview highlights the Artemis II mission. Courtesy Blacknight Space. 

Blacknight has been developing Event Horizon on CesiumJS since day one, enabling users across the globe to explore live orbital telemetry, verified flight trajectories, and mission milestones in a browser. (Organizations with sensitive information can employ an on-prem version of Event Horizon.) Users have access to curated data from trusted public satellite databases and can bring their own data—trajectory, attitude, and error ellipsoids, among others. 

Event Horizon connects to Cesium ion to provide Cesium World Terrain plus satellite imagery; Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles; and Cesium Moon when mission views bring the user close to Earth or our moon, to ensure efficient streaming of these massive datasets over the web. Users can connect their own ion accounts, too. The app provides models of spacecraft, such as the International Space Station and satellites, and those are rendered as glTF/.glb.  

Views seamlessly transition from Earth centric to Moon centric—and beyond—to meet the needs of complex storytelling. Planners and communicators authoring mission narratives with Event Horizon can add saved views and notes to indicate plans and milestones, like stage separations, payload deployments, or rendezvous, in immersive 4D. Blacknight works closely with partners, such as Cesium and COMSPOC, on physics, ephemeris, and rendering, ensuring accurate representation. 

Event Horizon's web interface provides an interactive 3D representation of space operations, mission milestones, and analytics. Courtesy Blacknight Space. 

“Our end users and customers always comment on how nice the visualizations look, and, in the space industry, accurate visualization is a critical aspect of mission planning and situational awareness. Cesium helps us paint that accurate picture,” McBee said. 

With Cesium’s roots in aerospace and defense, CesiumJS brings out-of-the-box capability to Event Horizon, but its openness and extensibility mean Blacknight can mold it further, implementing unique visualizations and data streams. Blacknight has another advantage, though: two of the organization’s aerospace engineers are Cesium Certified Developers, and McBee estimates they can do in 25% of their time what would require someone else’s full-time efforts. The team gets to their aerospace expertise quickly, while Cesium handles the geospatial context and rendering. 

“Being part of a company that's growing the Cesium ecosystem, after helping others share what they can do, shows how the Cesium community drives real progress,” said Kyle Heisey, director of operations at Blacknight Space. Heisey launched and managed the CCD program when he was a Cesium employee. 

Watch Klaus Konarkowski’s 2026 Cesium Developer Conference breakout session to learn about the role Cesium plays in Event Horizon.

Aerospace visualization with telemetry streaming, propagation and mission events - Klaus Konarkowski

As Blacknight continues its work on Event Horizon, the team is planning support for unique coordinate systems, relative orbit frames, and mobile performance.  

Bring real-world understanding to complicated narratives with CesiumJS and a Cesium ion account. 

Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon Showcases Mission Plans and Milestones with CesiumJS

Today, we're excited to share our second major technology preview focused on design model workflows in Cesium. In June, we introduced direct Cesium ion tiling support for widely used design formats, along with the Asset Elements API for querying model metadata. Now, we are expanding what you can do with design models after they are in Cesium, from keeping models current and identifying changes between versions to precise snapping, improved clipping and insets, georeferencing, and improvements to design model 3D tileset streaming and rendering.

Built on proven Bentley technology, including the iTwin Platform and iModels, these new capabilities make it easier to bring detailed design models and geospatial data together to create interactive, performant 3D digital twins. Early adopters are already using Cesium's new features to extend existing workflows. Engineering teams are generating and evaluating multiple design options, then sharing them in Cesium's 3D geospatial context to support stakeholder engagement and collaborative design reviews. State departments of transportation are bringing information from disparate systems into a single visual canvas, enabling teams to collaborate more effectively and accelerate decision-making. 

Below we share how these latest set of features help users create powerful custom workflows for  complex design and infrastructure data with Cesium that support better collaboration and faster, informed decisions.

With the enhanced design pipeline, element properties travel with the geometry from source model to 3D Tiles.

Keep models current with continuous design updates 

Design models change through a project. Now, when a design changes, you can re-upload the updated design to Cesium ion as a new version to the existing asset. 

This reduces the manual work required to keep digital twins current as designs evolve and updating ion asset IDs. In the coming months, we'll expand continuous updates to additional data types in Cesium ion. 

In Cesium ion, a listing of the 3D Tiles versions for a BIM/CAD model. Read more about versioning design models in Cesium ion in Model versions and content updates.

Updating a model is only part of the workflow; understanding what changed between versions can be just as important. 

The new Change Detection API identifies elements that were added, removed, or modified between design updates. Developers can query those changes and isolate or zoom directly to affected elements, including elements that are internal or hidden from view. 

Instead of manually comparing entire method models, applications can surface the changes that matter.

This Sandcastle demonstrates our new change detection capabilities. It compares the latest two versions of a BIM/CAD Database model and visualizes inserted, updated, and deleted elements in CesiumJS.

Bring designs and geospatial context together with GPU-driven clipping 

Placing a design into its real-world environment often means dealing with terrain that overlaps roads, buildings, excavations, and other proposed infrastructure. 

CesiumJS now uses a GPU-driven approach to support detailed clipping polygons, including polygons with holes. Fully clipped tiles can be excluded from loading, helping maintain smooth runtime performance even with complex clipping areas. 

In the coming months, Cesium ion will also generate precise model footprints automatically, reducing the need to manually draw clipping polygons.

With new GPU-driven clipping in CesiumJS, you can precisely place designs into their real-world environment, clipping them against terrain, buildings, and other infrastructure for a seamless digital twin.

Select design elements with precise snapping 

Runtime 3D Tiles are optimized for streaming, which means they're often simplified or decimated. That's great for rendering performance, but imprecise for tasks like measurement, clash detection, or exact placement. Design review and engineering workflows need to reference the original model geometry, not an approximation of it. 

Our new snapping workflow combines client and server capabilities to query the original source geometry of your design model. This allows users to snap directly to edges, vertices, and midpoints with millimeter-level precision. By leveraging "AEC" glTF extensions for preserving information about edge visibility and other details essential to BIM/CAD models, this workflow preserves rich design semantics and supports interoperability across tools and workflows.

This same capability will provide the foundation for additional tools, such as measurements, coming in a future release.

Vertex snap on source model geometry, streamed at full precision. 

Stadium

Position models with the CRS Search API 

Getting a design model into the right place starts with the right coordinate reference system. 

The new CRS Search API in Cesium ion lets developers search for valid coordinate systems and apply them when creating or posting assets. This makes it easier to build georeferencing directly into design model workflows and confidently position models into their real-world location.

Detailed CAD and BIM models can contain more information than an application may need. Embedding unused data into 3D tilesets increases the size and reduces streaming performance. 

New ingestion content filtering lets you exclude meshes, lines, or text during ingestion. Removing unnecessary content creates lighter, more focused tilesets optimized for what your application actually needs to stream and render.

Bring CAD-Style edge display to 3D Tiles 

Engineering models often rely on crisp edges and silhouettes to make complex geometry easier to understand. In July, we announced co-authored glTF extensions EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility to bring that visual language to the web. CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal use this extension to efficiently render sharp edges while avoiding visual issues such as z-fighting. 

New design model tilesets generated by Cesium ion will include these extensions by default, enabling CAD-style edge rendering out of the box. 

CesiumJS new rendering capability supports enhanced visual clarity for engineering models on the web, enabling better understanding and inspection of complex geometry.

We're continuing to expand design model workflows in Cesium, with several new capabilities that will release in 2026: 

Automated footprint generation: Auto-calculating precise footprints in Cesium ion for easier georeferencing. 

Interactive georeferencing wizard: An intuitive UI wizard to position and orient models faster within Cesium ion. 

Advanced asset element querying API: Support for element property calculations and advanced metadata queries directly via Cesium ion API. 

Client-side model navigation: Enhanced client-side visibility filters based on model hierarchy and design model tree navigation APIs. 

Snap-to-geometry measurement tools: Measurement widgets in the Cesium ion SDK that use precise snapping to reference original source geometry for millimeter-level accuracy. 

Keep your published design models up-to-date with the latest changes! Sign up for a free Cesium ion account, upload your DWG, RVT, IFC, or DGN files, and push updates as your design evolves, with millimeter-precise snapping and change detection built in from day one.

Today, we are excited to announce the first public release of our Vector Tiles Technology Preview across the Cesium and 3D Tiles ecosystem. This preview is a major step toward our implementation of the 3D Tiles 2.0 standard.  

This update introduces an end-to-end pipeline for tiling massive vector datasets into 3D Tiles using Cesium ion and high-fidelity rendering, including hierarchical level of detail, clamping to terrain, and dynamic styling in CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal.  

In June, we asked for your feedback on our vision for bringing 3D-native vector data to the 3D Tiles ecosystem. Thank you all for your inputs. From our conversations, we’ve identified and built around three key themes:  

The community needs a scalable way to stream massive, high-precision vector points, lines, and polygons that live in true 3D space while supporting existing 2D and 2.5D workflows such as placing vector data over 3D tilesets. 

To match existing conventions around symbology, styles, and colors, a flexible styling system is required to achieve the desired look with these vector data. 

Improved support for existing community adopted vector data formats is required. We need to be able to support importing those common formats and improve the rendering performance of formats we already support. 

A large vector tileset of global river flows dataset from HydroRIVER, styled by an average long-term discharge estimate for river reach. Zoomed in at the Mississippi River. 

A 3D-native vector tileset displayed along with a photogrammetry mesh of the Robert Street bridge in St. Paul, Minnesota. Shows cracks detected on the structure. Data courtesy of Collins Engineers, Inc. 

A unified workflow for massive 3D vector data 

With this release, you can add performant, global-scale vector rendering to your Cesium applications. You’ll be able to take advantage of the ease-of-use that you’ve come to expect from Cesium: drag-and-drop file upload of common vector data types into ion and add them to your scenes just like any other 3D Tiles asset. 

Cesium's introduction of vectors and CAD-style extensions into the 3D Tiles spec has unlocked the potential for us to provide our customers with highly detailed and faithful representations of the vector drawings they prefer to work with. By leveraging these features of 3D Tiles instead of developing our own proprietary spec, we are able to integrate into the wider open geospatial ecosystem, both contributing back and leveraging the innovations our colleagues in the field develop. 

Tiling vectors provides the best possible experience for our customers, by providing the ability to stream huge datasets, provide different levels of detail to suit the device viewing it, and to do so in a format that preserves the intricacies of the geometry, its styling and its metadata. The end result is a beautiful and performant viewing experience. 3D Tiles 2.0 is the first open specification that supports everything our application demands with extreme technical rigour - that is why we've picked it as our path towards precise, performant and beautifully-rendered vector graphics that rival native desktop solutions. 

Cesium ion has greatly accelerated our testing and prototyping pipeline, letting us focus on the outputs instead of the infrastructure, and rapidly iterate with the Cesium team on building tiling pipelines that suit our specialised needs. 

Harry Morris, Principal Engineer at Propeller Aero 

Progress towards 3D Tiles 2.0: Vector tiles are newly available with 3D Tiles 1.1 and extensions to glTF, and will be part of 3D Tiles 2.0 when ratified later this year. To support vector payloads that stream and render efficiently, we’ve contributed  KHR_mesh_primitive_restart and EXT_mesh_polygon, which can reduce glTF file size by up to 5x in common cases. By using glTF as the underlying tile payload, we ensure that vector data benefits from robust tooling available in the glTF ecosystem.

Vector tilesets in 3D Tiles 2.0 are glTF files, relying on a collection of old and new extensions to 3D Tiles 2.0 and glTF 2.1.

Tile and host vectors in Cesium ion: You can now upload a variety of vector files, including GeoJSON, GeoPackage, Geodatabase and Shapefiles, to Cesium ion to be processed into optimized 3D Tiles. This process preserves input vector properties, enabling semantic property-based LOD generation during tiling, and property-based operations and styling at runtime.

Tiling and hosting pipeline illustration. Various vector data formats are consumed with the geometry and property processed into 3D Tiles.

High-fidelity, high-precision visualization in CesiumJS: Experience high-performance rendering of massive vector datasets in the browser. Visualize 3D-native vectors directly in your geospatial context. Use the semantic metadata of the input vector data with Cesium’s styling capabilities to create dynamic, engaging visualizations.

Global river flows dataset from HydroRIVER. Showing North American view with fine LODs.

Initial support for Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) in CesiumJS: Load and drape existing 2D Mapbox vector tiles with 3D geospatial context, including streaming from existing third-party data sources. This was a popular request from the community, thanks again for your input!

The full OpenStreetMap road network for Philadelphia, styled by road class.

Cesium for Unreal (Engine Integration): Bring millimeter-precision vector data into Unreal Engine for immersive simulations and digital twins. This enables use cases like displaying complex road networks or AI-extracted infrastructure features directly within a game engine environment.

ODIS street segments for Berlin, styled by road class.

One of the most critical capabilities in this release is support for clamping vectors to terrain and 3D tiles. We know that for our users, precision is paramount. That’s why vector lines and polygons can now be clamped, or draped, to both global terrain and 3D Tiles types, such as high-resolution reality meshes and photogrammetry. Clamping 2D vectors directly to 3D Tiles allows for precisely aligning design strings to a scanned bridge or accurately overlaying AI-extracted features on a reality mesh. 

Polylines and polygons draped to Cesium World Terrain near Mount Hood, Oregon. 

Powerful, metadata-driven styling foundation 

A core benefit of our approach is the preservation of semantic metadata, which powers Cesium’s 3D Tiles Styling language. Using glTF extensions like EXT_mesh_features and EXT_structural_metadata enables you to style your data based on real-world attributes. 

Declarative styling in CesiumJS: Use JSON-based expressions to define rules for how features appear. For example, you can color building footprints by usage type or adjust line thickness based on traffic volume. 

Dynamic visuals: The preview supports sophisticated visuals at runtime, enabling styling that changes interactively, even for large datasets, for use cases like filters and animation. 

Per-feature control: Query and style individual elements enabling interactive visualizations where features respond to user input. 

Today's release contains our initial support for visual properties like line widths and colors, and we plan to add more styling capabilities, draping and styling support for points, and more over the coming months.

As we continue to build towards 3D Tiles 2.0 with vector tiles, we’d love your input to influence our roadmap. In particular: 

What styling capabilities will you need for your use cases? 

Are you using vector databases like GeoParquet or PostGIS? 

How does your application approach layering of vector data? 

We want to hear how you use these new styling, streaming, and clamping capabilities to solve your most complex geospatial challenges.  

Share your feedback on the Cesium Community Forum, we'd love to hear about your experiences. 

Documentation: Vector Tiles Technology Preview

Tutorial: Drape and style vector data on terrain and 3D Tiles

Tutorial: Load Mapbox Vector Tiles in CesiumJS

Tutorial: Vector Tiles in Cesium for Unreal

Sandcastle: Global Rivers Vector Tiles with Property-based LOD

Vector Tiles: A Technology Preview for Cesium and 3D Tiles 

In this month’s releases, we’re moving vector tiles, clipping polygons, design models, and asset management forward:  

This release contains our vector tiles technology preview, representing significant progress towards our implementation of 3D Tiles 2.0. You can now complete end-to-end vector workflows by uploading common vector data file formats into ion for tiling and then streaming those tiles to CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal. Use the CesiumJS styling language to dynamically style those vectors in your applications. See our blog post for all the details. 

We’ve also improved CesiumJS clipping polygons based on similar techniques used in our vector tiles implementation. You can now create detailed clipping regions over large geographic areas. 

In the coming days, Cesium ion will introduce new capabilities for working with design models (BIM/CAD with Database), including an API to list the changes between two versions of a model. Keep an eye out for our blog post! The Cesium ion release will also include a new asset management model that separates source files from tiled assets, giving users greater control over storage usage today while laying the foundation for future capabilities, such as retiling data without reuploading source files. 

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 1.145 is now available. Highlights of the release include: 

As part of the vector tiles technology preview, added support for draping clamped vector tile polygons and polylines onto 3D Tiles, with a new heightReference option and matching read-only property on BufferPrimitiveCollection. You can now drape your vectors onto terrain and 3D Tiles. #13653

ClippingPolygons now use an algorithm, based on the techniques used for vector tiles, that vastly improves quality across distance scales. You can now clip regions of the world across multiple miles with accurate vector cutouts. Warm-up cost is also modestly decreased. #13654 

ClippingPolygons now have support for specifying holes (aka islands) within each polygon for complex clipping tasks. This works in inverse clipping workflows as well. #13660 

Added experimental IonSnapService for server-side snap-to-geometry against Cesium ion assets backed by a BIM/CAD Database model, and the SnapService interface it implements. This enables building features such as measurement of design geometry with CAD-level precision and accuracy. #13682 

A GeoJson footprint of Sweden used as a clipping polygon on the globe, now with support for holes (excluded regions) inside the clipping polygon. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.29.1 is now available. 

This release updates cesium-native from v0.63.0 to v0.64.0. 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

Cesium for Unity v1.25.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include: 

Fixed a NullReferenceException that could be thrown if a CesiumCreditSystem was destroyed before it was ever enabled. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumCreditSystem would not unsubscribe from delegates on disable, causing duplicate subscriptions when re-enabled. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.63.0 to v0.64.0. 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 ion SaaS** 

- Exciting new features for working with design models are coming to Cesium ion this week! Watch for our blog post.  
- In the next few days we will release improvements to how assets are managed in Cesium ion. The source files for tiled data will be managed separately from the tiled assets, which will immediately give users more control over their Cesium ion storage quota. It will unlock more enhancements in future releases, such as the ability to retile without reuploading source files.  
    - Note: This change will result in a recalculation of account storage totals. As a result, we will also increase the storage quotas for each Cesium ion tier. Look for more details through email and in your Cesium ion account.  
- Updated the vector tiler to accept new formats. Also changed the enum for the SourceType that runs the vector pipeline from `GEOJSON` to `VECTOR_DATA`. [Read more in the vector tiles technology preview blog](https://cesium.com/blog/2026/09/02/vector-tiles-technology-preview-cesium-and-3d-tiles/). 

**Cesium ion Self-Hosted**

Cesium ion Self-Hosted 1.11.0 is now available. 

- Added the ability to run self-hosted reconstruction jobs using iTwin Capture. To learn more, contact Cesium sales.  
- Added support for labels. 
- Design tiler: added IfcSpace relations to element properties in IFC metadata. 
- Fixed a bug with `features.deleteSources` where the sources volume wasn’t being cleaned correctly. 
- Point cloud tiler: fixed an issue where PNTS attributes could have incorrect alignment if compression was turned off. 
- Design tiler: tweaked IFC swept circular geometry for more consistent rotational offsets. 
- Reality tiler: fixed a race condition that could lead to subtree files with content/availability bits incorrectly set to zero. 

**Vector tiler**

- New vector tiler available as a technology preview. 

**Design tiler**

- Fixed an issue where texture scales can be wrong when using Meshopt compression. 
- Changed `noData` value for float-type metadata to `-9999.0`, from `0`. This makes collisions with real metadata values less likely. 

CalTa’s TRANCITY ARCADE uses Cesium ion, 3D Tiles, and Cesium for Unreal to create interactive applications for education, training, safety awareness, facility guidance, and communication. 

The Acceleration Agency is building a web-based CesiumJS digital twin for the Port of Corpus Christi that will serve ArcGIS data to secure external partners during emergencies. 

Hopeworks uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to place Blender models in geospatial context for Camden city planning.

For the Port of Corpus Christi, Texas, USA, managing security operations is a monumental task. The Port encompasses nearly 125 square miles, across both land and water, and directly owns close to 35,000 acres. This enormous footprint is spread over two counties with hundreds of facilities, vehicles, and vessels active at any time, and the Port relies on dozens of disparate digital systems for everything from vessel tracking to security. 

“Go into just about any first responder dispatch center, what do you see, screens upon screens to display more and more windows. We knew we needed to create a comprehensive view of Port activities.” 

- Darrell Keach, Business Systems Manager and the Port’s lead for OPTICS

With funding from a Department of Homeland Security grant to enhance critical infrastructure security, the Port brought on The Acceleration Agency (TAA) to build OPTICS, a 3D operational active digital twin that merges many of these systems into a single pane of glass and spatially organizes the data for true comprehensive situational awareness. TAA created both a desktop and mobile app for the Port that integrated live vessel traffic and computer aid dispatch with a geospatial model built using ArcGIS Maps SDK, giving port operators a realistic, real-time view of their environment.

This deployment served its purpose for internal teams; however, the Port is also looking to share this new fused dataset with security partners such as the United States Coast Guard. Deploying the app to external users during a crisis would be cumbersome: granting and revoking access to the secure application, which contains sensitive law enforcement data subject to FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) requirements, created an administrative bottleneck. The port needed a solution that could be rapidly deployed to authorized external users on any device without requiring an installation, and that could also easily rescind access when needed.

Active Digital Twin of the Port of Corpus Christi built by The Acceleration Agencywith ProjectGemini’s SaaS leveraging CesiumJS. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

ProjectGemini Cesium Web 7-23-2026

The solution was CesiumJS. TAA developed Project Gemini, their Active Digital Twin platform and framework, which uses CesiumJS for geospatial visualization. The Port’s Active Digital Twin with CesiumJS is designed to give supervisors and dispatchers a better way to view various security-related operations in one single view, wherever they may be located. “Creating a mobile and web version allows us to put much of this data in the hands of officers in the field,” Keach said.

Active Digital Twin of the Port of Corpus Christi built with ProjectGemini’s SaaS leveraging CesiumJS. Users can locate and view live security camera feeds through the intuitive geospatial interface. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

After years of investment in OPTICS, creating an entirely new, web-based 3D Active Digital Twin could have been daunting. But because CesiumJS embraces an open ecosystem and the ability to consume ArcGIS content out of the box, the team was able to directly ingest the Port’s existing ArcGIS Enterprise data. Rather than rebuilding the data pipeline from scratch, TAA used CesiumJS to bridge their existing geospatial data with what could be an easily shareable web environment.

The CesiumJS version of the digital twin provides all the same models and real-time updates as the Unity application. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

The Port of Corpus Christi digital twin app version created in Unity3D. The desktop version has a photorealistic look while the web version prioritizes performance. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

The flexibility of open standards and community-driven development allowed TAA to develop a highly accessible web-based Active Digital Twin. When it’s complete, the Port of Corpus Christi will be able to use the CesiumJS Active Digital Twin to grant secure, temporary access to a real-time operational view during an emergency, empowering rapid, cross-agency collaboration in critical moments.

Detailed information about facilities, together with live information such as lists of vessels currently on site, makes the digital twin an essential tool in understanding the evolving nature of events on site. Courtesy The Acceleration Agency.

To get started with CesiumJS, experiment in Cesium Sandcastle, which has code examples and an AI-driven chat panel for support.

The Acceleration Agency Leverages CesiumJS to Expand Port of Corpus Christi Active Digital Twin

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).

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. 

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. 

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.

Over a decade ago, we showcased RikiTraki, a CesiumJS application built by Ricardo Morin for recording hiking trails. Ricardo was one of the first people to see the potential value of Cesium’s high accuracy 3D terrain rendering for outdoor sports. RikiTraki, a place to upload GPX tracks and photos from hikes, was largely a personal project, but Ricardo made it open to the public—and open source.

When Ricardo released RikiTraki 2.0, which now has hundreds of registered users, we caught up on his latest developments. New improvements to the site are a reflection of the significant investment Ricardo has put into the application; they’re also an illustration of how Cesium has evolved over the last ten years.

RikiTraki allows users to upload GPX tracks from their hikes, which they can review and share in 3D. Rendering on 3D terrain makes it easier to understand a hiker’s experience in the area. Courtesy Ricardo Morin.

RikiTraki 2.0 Tam McArthur Rim

All 3D: In 2015, visitors to RikiTraki would find a 2D world map built with Leaflet and the option to switch to Cesium for 3D. At the time, Ricardo felt that a 2D map was necessary for devices that didn’t have the compute power or support to run Cesium. Now, the entire site uses CesiumJS. With an always-3D view, users can seamlessly zoom in to individual trails or out for a global view. This shift was made possible by years of performance improvements by our CesiumJS team work at nearly every layer of the engine.

Efficient streaming: In its original form, RikiTraki loaded all available tracks at once, which became increasingly impractical as more users contributed data—a classic geospatial challenge. Ricardo solved this challenge by revising the app to request and display only the tracks relevant to the visitor's current view. This same principle is the foundation of 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets. Instead of downloading an entire dataset, 3D Tiles allows applications to efficiently stream only the portion of the world a user is looking at. And with the recent advancements in 3D Tiles 2.0, developers can now stream not just 3D models but also time-dynamic content, vector data, and continuous datasets with voxels, ensuring CesiumJS is ready for the next generation of global scale apps like RikiTraki.

Visitors to RikiTraki can explore GPX tracks near them. Courtesy Ricardo Morin.

Simplified layout: With the latest version of RikiTraki, side and bottom panels that provide more details, such as the elevation profile of a trail, open only as needed. CesiumJS has similarly advanced to offer a modular structure, giving developers access to what they need, when they need it. 

Personal data: RikiTraki was meant for sharing trails, and viewers have always been able to see paths in their area or across the world. Now, each visitor to RikiTraki also has a personal page to view, manage, and curate their own tracks separately from the public tracks. This dual approach to supporting personal data and offering access to global datasets is the philosophy behind Cesium ion, which allows CesiumJS developers to bring their own data for tiling as 3D Tiles or find global datasets like Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

Nambe Loop, New Mexico. For every trail on RikiTraki, visitors can view detailed information about the track. Courtesy Ricardo Morin.

Time dynamic visualization: RikiTraki doesn’t just show a hiker’s entire path at once: an animation draws the route, with the camera tracking the position along the route as it gets drawn. This allows hikers to relive their treks. 4D visualization is a core component of CesiumJS, drawn from our roots in aerospace, that makes Cesium valuable for understanding temporal spatial data. 

3D terrain: CesiumJS has always been 3D first, and from its inception RikiTraki provided visitors with 3D terrain that gave them an intuitive understanding of their hikes. The site originally used elevation values from GPS devices, which were often uncalibrated or inconsistent, so track elevation is now sampled directly from the terrain. The elevation profile of a track gives viewers a quick understanding of the course of the path. High quality terrain in CesiumJS isn’t just for looks: it’s a critical foundation that allows many in our community to perform measurements and analysis.

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

Easy sharing: RikiTraki has always been publicly available on the internet and easy to share with a link. In the newest version, URLs are simple and predictable, clearly listing the user name to link to a personal space, the lat/lon to show a location, or a track ID for a specific trail. Likewise, CesiumJS endures as an accessible, secure way to share your geospatial data.

Open source: Ricardo’s work, like CesiumJS itself, is open source and on GitHub. Ricardo documents the site’s architecture and updates on his blog, and he has contributed in the past to Cesium learning materials. We encourage all members of the CesiumJS community to be active contributors to CesiumJS and the community forum.

"My work has always been open source. For me, it feels good to give something back to the community. If other developers want to see how I built RikiTraki or fork the project and build their own app, they can. That's the strength of an open source community." 

For more than ten years, RikiTraki has provided a way to visualize, remember, and share outdoor experiences. We’re proud of the apps our community builds with CesiumJS and committed to continuously improving the tools you use: subscribe to the release roundup thread on the Cesium forum to get monthly notifications of new releases.

RikiTraki’s Hiking Tracks on the Web Evolve Alongside CesiumJS

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. 

Blacknight Space’s Event Horizon Showcases Mission Plans and Milestones with CesiumJS

More design model workflows with Cesium

Vector Tiles: A Technology Preview for Cesium and 3D Tiles

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Cesium Releases in August 2026

RikiTraki’s Hiking Tracks on the Web Evolve Alongside CesiumJS