Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.16.2

CesiumJS 1.131

Integrations

It’s been just over nine months since Cesium joined Bentley Systems. We’ve used that time to learn more about the technologies built by Bentley and opportunities to bring them to the community. As we look forward to the first Cesium Developer Conference, we are sharing our roadmap to seek your guidance as we bring iTwin digital twin capabilities to Cesium. 

Our mission is to empower the community to build 3D geospatial experiences at the convergence of the built and natural environment. 3D Tiles has seen tremendous adoption, including by Google, Esri, Ansys, FOX Sports, The Weather Company, GE Aerospace, MathWorks, CAE, Trimble, and DroneDeploy, to name a few. Cesium ion receives more than 300 million monthly requests from over 30,000 monthly active users. Cesium’s runtime engines—CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse—continue to enable rapid development of new 3D geospatial applications by an ever-growing community as we continue to deeply invest in open source. There is bottomless demand for more curated data, high-performance tiling pipelines that support more inputs, tools for more efficient end-to-end workflows, and improved end-to-end performance. 

As part of Bentley, we have the opportunity to radically empower and expand the 3D geospatial community by leveraging best-in-class technology from Bentley to benefit all the broader ecosystem. Cesium has always been guided by community input, and we’d like your feedback on these themes on our roadmap: 

Integrate reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services with Cesium ion; 

Expose iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium; 

Introduce composable tiling pipelines to optimize your data as 3D Tiles; 

Advance Cesium runtime engines to capitalize on new 3D Tiles extensions and platform integrations; 

Provide reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets; and 

Improve learning material and ongoing maintenance. 

3D Tiles is the core of the platform. It is the thread that weaves through the entire platform and community to be a cohesive end-to-end workflow, empowering developers to build extraordinary applications. We’re adding several capabilities to 3D Tiles that have been long requested by the community. 

Users across industries are capturing the environment at ever greater resolutions, more frequently, and with more types of devices. This exponential scaling creates opportunities to extend the 3D Tiles specification for more efficient storage, streaming, visualization, and analysis of 3D geospatial data that is spatially coherent and updated over time. 

Time-dynamic 3D Tiles is an extension that efficiently introduces the time dimension to 3D Tiles. Using time-dynamic tiles allows a single tileset to be updated over time, with each new capture updating only affected tiles. No longer will an entirely new tileset need to be created for each update; a single tileset can be updated incrementally, preserving a history of changes and allowing for more efficient and faster generation of updated tiles.  These can be used for analytical workflows, too, such as changeset analysis over time and comparing tilesets over time to design models. Visit the GitHub issue to share your input. 

Time-dynamic tiles allow a single tileset to be updated over time, with each new capture updating only affected tiles.

We’re also exploring connecting Bentley’s SYNCHRO 4D Schedule API to generate time-dynamic 3D tilesets. The SYNCHRO 4D Schedule API allows time-dynamic project data to be accessed and used over the web. This connection will converge time-dynamic geometry with business intelligence. 

Volumetric data has become an important way to visualize real-world content in numerous domains where continuous representation of data is required, such as geology, oceanography, and climate science. The 3D Tiles specification is intentionally flexible in supporting a variety of geometry types to best represent massive heterogenous data. By using voxels (volumetric elements) as a 3D payload with 3D Tiles, you will be able to build applications with global-scale volumetric data. We’re working on ellipsoidal, cuboid, and cylindrical voxels as a starting point in the 3D Tiles specification with glTF as the voxel payload. This will enable opportunities for volumetric data for subsurface, land, air, and space. Take a look at the draft Voxels extension. 

Water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico represented using Voxels in CesiumJS.

One of the most popular topics recently in computer graphics is 3D Gaussian splats. High-resolution reality meshes and point clouds are fantastic for digitalizing our natural environment, but they fall short in capturing a few types of information, such as cables, trees, bars, telecom towers, etc. 3D Gaussian splats have proven to be a fantastic solution for preserving visual detail while maintaining very high fidelity. 

We are excited to add 3D Gaussian splats as a payload type in 3D Tiles, including adding the technology behind iTwin Capture to Cesium ion to enable modeling and tiling of 3D Gaussian splats. We’re collaborating with the glTF community and introducing a 3D Gaussian splat extension for glTF.  

Comparing 3D Gaussian splats using 3D Tiles (left) with Reality Meshes (right), with particular significance to the thin-and-long geometry such as wires, dishes, poles, and scaffolding.

Bentley Systems was an early adopter of 3D Tiles and has developed extensions to enhance the 3D visualization capabilities required for detailed infrastructure models. Cesium joining Bentley presents the opportunity to converge these extensions and runtime implementations to make them accessible to the entire community.  We are working on adding edges and wireframes, line rendering and materials (width, patterns, colors), customizable point sizes, billboards for annotations, and more. 

A 3D Tileset visualized in iTwin.js with glTF EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility extension for highlighting edges.

Implicit surfaces enable representations of parametric shapes—like pipes, columns, beams, boxes, spheres, and cylinders—when used with other implicit surfaces for the creation of complex geometries that are hard to represent with triangle meshes. The benefits of this are in the storage and accuracy for analytics. Because the surfaces are not approximated as triangles meshes, the surfaces are rendered without geometric error. We are building on the glTF implicit shapes extension, introduced by Microsoft. 

The 3D Tiles specification supports rich metadata that adds properties and classifications to geometry. The metadata specification is written with the intent to add semantics at different granularities and for a variety of industries and use-cases. There is a need to define semantic vocabularies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry that also offer a taxonomy applicable to classes of objects. Capturing the meaning of these classes in a standard vocabulary enables downstream repurposing of this information in AI-driven data validation, data–interoperability, analytics, or interactivity. For example, downstream understanding that a class in a custom user-schema is modeling “doors” could be captured in terms of an applicable standard vocabulary—from IFC, Uniclass, or BIS—which other data consumers could operate on.  

The Base Infrastructure Schema (BIS) is a family of modular schemas that express taxonomy, data structure, and relationships for modeling federated data from infrastructure engineering. BIS schemas are organized into layers, most of them defining the rules and patterns considered as standard in the BIS ecosystem. The semantics embedded in standard BIS schemas have proven to be valuable in contexts beyond iModels.  

We’re working on a 3D Tiles extension for metadata semantics to cover classes, as well as ensuring encoding properly enables BIS and other similar semantic vocabularies.  

Integrate reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services with Cesium ion

One of the most exciting outcomes of Cesium joining Bentley is the opportunity to integrate reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services with Cesium ion. You have been vocal about wanting to be able to upload photos to generate 3D models, and we’re thrilled to be able to deliver on that by integrating the industry-leading technology used in iTwin Capture with Cesium ion. By using an integrated end-to-end pipeline from photos to 3D Tiles and from 3D Tiles to rendering and analytics, we aim to provide the best-in-class experience for using reality data in your 3D geospatial applications. With the advancements in 3D Gaussian splats, this will also support the pipeline to go from photos to 3D tilesets of splats. 

Adding Reality Modeling to Cesium ion enables users to create 3D Tiles from photos as input using the reality modeling technology used in iTwin Capture.

Reality analysis using AI feature detectors

Bentley has also built the technology to identify objects, regions of interest, or defects in reality data using AI. By integrating reality analysis into Cesium ion, we want to enable users to apply 3D segmentation and classification to reality. This analysis will be enabled in two forms: 

Embedded metadata in the 3D Tileset, allowing for runtime querying, styling, and filtering. 

Supplemental vector data as features extracted from the reality data, which can be used for overlays, annotations, and styling. 

We are adding vector data support in Cesium’s native plugins to enable all runtimes to use the results of the reality analysis. The result: real-world insights into reality data, supporting data-driven decisions. 

A 3D Tileset of a point cloud with embedded classification generated using AI-enabled reality analysis service.

For an initial release, we’ll enable analysis on reality meshes and point clouds, providing you with options through a growing list of curated analysis detectors. You will be able to analyze models already uploaded to ion, or generated with ion’s new reality modeling capabilities, creating an efficient, end-to-end workflow. The curated detectors include analysis for segmentation of trees, railway objects, and city elements, as well as others.  

In future releases, you can create your own custom detectors to run in ion. We are planning for 3D analysis of Gaussian splats, 2D segmentation of photo collections, and offering analysis in Cesium ion Self-Hosted.  

Expose iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium

iTwin Platform powers digital twin solutions that are used in AEC applications to design, build, and operate infrastructure around the world. By connecting iTwin and Cesium platforms, our goal is to provide a complete platform for digital twin experiences for the built and natural environment, with a strong commitment to open source, open standards, and open APIs. 

Exposing iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium channels will enable you to leverage capabilities like clash detection for design reviews; change elements to monitor design updates; perform analysis, such as carbon calculations; and apply AI-powered federated search to search and filter across 3D objects, engineering information, and business documents. Using iTwin Platform’s synchronization services, you will be able to bring in many more inputs for design models, which can then be added to Cesium apps as 3D Tiles. 

Clash detection and review shown in iTwin.js. 

Introduce composable tiling pipelines to optimize your data as 3D Tiles

Tiling pipelines to create 3D Tiles enable you to bring your own data into your 3D geospatial applications, a core requirement for most use cases. Over the years, Cesium has developed and introduced many tiling pipelines for different types of data: reality data, point clouds, design models, 3D buildings, terrain, imagery, and more. All of these tiling pipelines have their technological merits, but they are siloed based on the type of input data. Adding Bentley’s tiling pipelines for reality data and AEC design models results in even more tiling and optimization algorithms—that are also siloed. 

The vision for composable tiling pipelines is to have a unified, modularized, plugin-based pipeline that allows users to configure the stages for data conversion, tiling, and optimization. Example stages can include input file format conversions, coordinate system operations, mesh decimation, texture simplification, choice of tiling schemes, texture atlasing, mesh and texture compression, metadata processing, incremental updates, 3D Tiles-to-3D Tiles optimization, and output validation. The stages will be connected using a graph structure allowing the mix and match of stages, with a set of standard ready-to-use pipelines available to all of our users. 

Improvements to AEC-to-3D Tiles workflows

Community reception of Cesium’s Design Tiler and Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In has been overwhelmingly positive, with lots of input on more design applications and features to be supported. With additions from Bentley software, we aim to level up the workflows for AEC data in key areas: 

Support for other CAD formats to 3D Tiles, such as Navisworks, MicroStation, and SketchUp. 

Ability to do incremental near real-time tiling. As you are creating and updating your designs, we want to add the ability to tile only the changed elements, rather than the entire model. This will shorten the life cycle by having a ready-to-go 3D Tileset alongside your design models at all times. This will be complemented by lightweight apps to synchronize your designs into a geospatial experience. 

Enhancements to the LOD generation in the Design Tiler to better support even larger and high-detail projects. 

Specialized 3D Tiles selection algorithms using metadata-driven rendering, filtering, and search. 

Triangle mesh of an AEC model with 10 million triangles created in Autodesk Revit and visualized in CesiumJS using 3D Tiles.

If you’d like to see specific software or features supported, reach out to us on the community forum. 

Advance Cesium runtime engines to capitalize on new 3D Tiles extensions and product integrations

Cesium’s open source runtime engines—CesiumJS for the browser and plugins for Unreal Engine, Unity, and NVIDIA Omniverse—are the face of the platform as the software users experience and interact with the most. The roadmap for runtime engines will advance the convergence of built and natural environment, AEC and geospatial, and of iTwin Platform and Cesium, providing developers and users with extended capabilities. 

The biggest impact for runtime engines will be the implementation and deep integration of the aforementioned updates to the 3D Tiles specification including 3D Gaussian splats, voxels, time-dynamic 3D Tiles, geometry highlights, implicit surfaces, and more. The addition of these advancements in every runtime will be a giant leap forward for many industries and applications. 

With the aim to lower the barrier to entry for building applications that integrate iTwin Platform APIs and services, we’ll add developer APIs and user interfaces for easy integration with iTwins. This means you will be able to build 3D geospatial applications integrating engineering and business information from iTwin into Cesium applications, similar to services like Cesium ion. 

In addition to the cross-cutting updates we covered above, we’re also making engine-specific improvements: 

Add configurable preset camera options to allow other navigation types, such as first-person walkthroughs in indoor spaces, underground, and undersea, toward more immersive applications. 

Improve vector data visualization, including rendering improvements to lines rendering, billboards, and overall scalability of these systems. 

Support multiple viewports for different views in the same runtime with optimized streaming and selection algorithms. This benefits a broad spectrum of applications, including AEC, simulation, operational environments, infrastructure inspections, and many more. 

Develop a new Sandcastle to make onboarding, prototyping, and learning easier. 

Longer term, we’ll explore using WebGPU as a generational advancement in Graphics API. We’re also interested in unifying the 3D Tiles selection and traversal algorithms using Cesium Native via WebAssembly, creating a single reusable library for all Cesium runtimes, resulting in faster updates and efficiency across the board. As we explore these forward-looking upgrades, we’ll continue to invest in the broad compatibility of CesiumJS across browsers, platforms, and devices. 

3D reality mesh with AI-powered reality analysis-generated features visualized in CesiumJS.

Cesium Native, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse

Introduce a decoration system for runtime enrichment of 3D geospatial scenes with 3D assets. The system empowers creators building rich 3D geospatial environments to add capabilities like runtime editing of 3D Tiles materials, adding 3D objects to the environment, such as trees, cars, and city furniture, and synchronizing with the cloud. This will allow you to dynamically augment captured reality data with high-fidelity models at runtime, such as from Unreal Engine’s Fab marketplace. 

Performance is an evergreen pursuit with all runtime engines, but especially so with the native runtimes, where the benchmarks are real-time games. We’ll continue to invest in performance optimizations that reduce latency, improve game thread usage, lower memory overhead, and overall create a seamless experience. 

With the introduction of time-dynamic 3D Tiles for use cases like project scheduling and simulation, we’ll also add capabilities that take advantage of game engine features like animations, physics, controllers, and more. This will help create a full digital twin of not just the environment but also the vehicles, heavy machinery, traffic simulation, equipment, tools, and other IoT devices.  

iModel of a soccer stadium in Singapore visualized in Cesium for Unreal as 3D Tiles using iTwin’s Mesh Export service.

Building geospatial applications needs data, which is usually fragmented, unprocessed, and not streaming or runtime ready. We aim to lower the barrier to entry by making global datasets accessible, especially where data may be difficult to collect. Toward that goal, we are: 

Upgrading Cesium World Terrain—adding new and higher resolution content across the world. 

Adding high-resolution insets on the Moon. 

Introducing a planetary dataset for Mars. 

Providing analytically derived datasets, such as land-use classification. 

In addition to curated data, we’ll continue to invest in collaborations with Microsoft, Google, and other ecosystem partners to add more datasets for the community via Cesium ion. 

Provide reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets

In line with our cross-cutting product and open standards investments for more powerful 3D geospatial applications, we will publish a library of reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets that leverage existing libraries used by iTwin. These will allow you to build even more powerful applications faster and make them configurable, so that each application can refine the widgets and workflows. 

A representative mockup of the new Sandcastle built using the Strata library for components.

Improve learning material and ongoing maintenance

Authentic education is part of Cesium’s mission. Over the years, we have written many tutorials, presented dozens of conference talks, provided hundreds of code examples in Sandcastle, and joined the community in answering over 18,000 topics on the forum, and now we are on the cusp of hosting our first developer conference. 

As the field of 3D geospatial continues to advance, there is also an increase in demand for accessible, up-to-date learning content. To serve our community, we plan to roll out tutorials on reality modeling, AI feature detectors, 3D Gaussian splats, configuring runtime engines, performance optimization, and using and extending metadata in 3D Tiles. We are also creating a new Sandcastle for the example code repository that has improved modern developer tools like IntelliSense, code validation, and better search and organization so you can easily find what you are looking for. 

Finally, ongoing maintenance should not be underrated. It is part of our pact with the community, the heartbeat of the platform, and it generates fresh ideas for our collective roadmap. Pull requests need to be reviewed. Bugs (or fixes!) in browsers or game engines need corresponding updates. Better workflows for engaging with and creating transparency for the community on GitHub and the community forum need to be explored, especially as we introduce iTwin Platform and iTwin Capture. We will increase our essential activity here. 

Our aim is to strengthen and expand the open platform to serve the software developer community building digital twins for the built and natural environment. To do this, we will explore avenues to bring Bentley's capabilities to you, along with increasing our investments in R&D, the open-source community, and industry collaborations. 

Throughout Cesium’s history, the community has guided us, and we want to continue to hear from you. What are the products, features, integrations, and bug fixes that you would like to see?  Are there capabilities within iTwin or other Bentley products we should prioritize for integration? Are there open standards we should integrate or partnerships we should invest in? 

We want to hear all requests—big or small—for what you would like to see from Cesium and for the ecosystem in general. Share your thoughts with us on the community forum.

Cesium Roadmap for Bridging the Built and Natural Environment 

We are excited to share that a geospatially accurate 3D Globe is now available in the open source platform QGIS as part of the QGIS 3.44 stable release. This development fulfills a critical need for QGIS users, enabling visualization of both 3D Tiles and other standard geospatial layers at global scale. This project is the next step toward greater access to 3D geospatial tools in QGIS. 

In QGIS 3.44, users have the option to create a new 3D Globe view in their projects. Courtesy North Road and Lutra Consulting.

A geospatially accurate 3D Globe is now available in the open source platform QGIS as part of the QGIS 3.44 stable release. This work is the result of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant supporting the partnership of Lutra Consulting and North Road, serving QGIS’s million active users.

3D Globe in QGIS by North Road and Lutra Consulting

This work is the result of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant supporting the partnership of Lutra Consulting and North Road, serving QGIS’s million active users. This is the second grant for the team; the first enabled 3D Tiles visualization in QGIS.  

In QGIS 3.44, users have the option to create a new 3D Globe view in their projects. This complements the existing option to create a small scale, local 3D Scene. Globe views display the world as a geospatially accurate ellipsoid and show 3D content (such as 3D Tiles) alongside projected 2D map content (such as raster, mesh, and vector datasets). They are rendered with an intuitive shading effect to allow for better depth perception.  

New York City, USA, in QGIS, as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Cesium ion. Courtesy North Road and Lutra Consulting.  

Update your QGIS to the latest release, 3.44.  

You can create a new 3D Globe view by selecting the View menu, 3D Map Views, and clicking “New 3D Globe View.” This will open a new 3D globe, showing Earth (or a different celestial body) as an ellipsoid. 

For optimal results, we recommend loading 3D Tiles from the QGIS Cesium ion plugin, which connects directly to your data.  

We welcome feedback from the community. File a QGIS issue report or feature request to share your thoughts with us.

With Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK), engineers model land, sea, air, and space scenarios to understand the relationships among vehicles, payloads, facilities, and environments, including terrain. Ansys Geospatial Data Cloud (GDC) 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.

UAV over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Courtesy Ansys.

STK was released in 1989 to serve US and allied aerospace and defense organizations, and GDC will be available to STK users in July 2025. Users may create virtual worlds including buildings, terrain, and other physical structures. Subsequently, an infinite number of simulation configurations may be exercised, resulting in a significant reduction in the dependence on physical prototypes.

Using Cesium, GDC will replace Ansys’ Geospatial Content Server, removing the need to develop and maintain their own real-world data, tilers, and hosting solution.

“Being able to use Cesium ion Self-Hosted has saved a significant number of man hours that can be redirected towards additional ways to take advantage of the unprecedented access to data. We estimate the time savings to be the equivalent of half a full-time employee,” the Ansys team noted.  

Cesium has helped Ansys enhance mission modeling since 2011.

Communication signal to noise over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self Hosted. Courtesy Ansys.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted provides hosting, tiling, and streaming for massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets in users’ own clouds, data centers, or edge devices, enabling air-gapped solutions that meet strict security requirements and can be deployed to remote, disconnected environments.

GDC accesses Cesium World Terrain, Cesium World Bathymetry, Cesium OSM Buildings, Japan 3D Buildings and Terrain, and Cesium Moon Terrain via Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Accurate elevation data, depth data, and per-building metadata support planning and analysis in critical simulations. Cesium OSM Buildings are streamed as 3D Tiles in conjunction with Cesium World Terrain or Cesium World Bathymetry. Users can add their own datasets to be tiled into 3D Tiles for optimal streaming and visualization in STK.

UAV flying low over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Real-world data enables clearer pictures for analysis and decisions in complex multidomain scenarios.

Create and host 3D content in your own environment with Cesium ion Self-Hosted, and visit Ansys in the Cesium booth at GEOINT Symposium, #2231, to see Geospatial Data Cloud in action.

Hear from Ansys at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.

Ansys Uses Cesium ion Self-Hosted for Geospatial Data Cloud

We're excited to announce the release of 3D Tiles for Godot, an open source plugin for Godot Engine built by Battle Road through the support of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant. 

The 3D Tiles for Godot plugin brings real-world 3D geospatial data to the Godot Asset Library. Courtesy Battle Road.

Announcing 3D Tiles for Godot, an open source plugin for Godot Engine built by Battle Road through the support of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant. 

3D Tiles for Godot

Godot Engine is the largest cross-platform, free, and open source game engine. The 3D Tiles for Godot plugin brings the most performant and precise 3D data to this global developer community, with a high-accuracy WGS84 globe and support for 3D Tiles. Godot users can easily integrate curated geospatial content via Cesium ion, such as terrain, imagery, and buildings, as well as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, along with their own data. 

3D Tiles for Godot is the latest entrant in a growing ecosystem of open source applications supported by the Cesium Native library, which includes Cesium's plugins for Unreal, Unity, Omniverse, and other third-party applications. These efforts have benefited from cross-engine functional exchanges enabled by open source. 

Battle Road, developer of AtomEngine, a platform for modeling and simulation at planet scale, created the open source plugin for the Godot Asset Library, available here.  

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

“At Battle Road, we reap the benefits of open source software every day and we’re honored to have an opportunity to give back. Over the past few months, we’ve worked closely with Cesium and Godot—both icons of the open source community—to bring the innovative capabilities of 3D Tiles to Godot, accelerated by Cesium Native. We believe Godot is the best open source game engine out there, and with new datasets like Cesium World Terrain, Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, and more now at your fingertips, the possibilities are endless,” said Josh Henderson, Battle Road CEO and co-founder. 

“It’s collaboration and innovation from the community that build the 3D geospatial ecosystem, with openness and interoperability at the heart of the work. Battle Road’s contribution enables Godot’s global developer community to build projects that bridge the built and natural environments and efficiently stream massive datasets using 3D Tiles,” said Patrick Cozzi, Bentley Systems chief platform officer and Cesium founder. 

Farm visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via 3D Tiles for Godot. Courtesy Battle Road.

Take a look at Battle Road’s guide to launching 3D Tiles for Godot for your next project. The Battle Road team is committed to maintaining and updating the plugin. There is now also a category on Cesium’s community forum to interact with the plugin’s creators and with other Cesium users getting started on 3D geospatial projects in Godot.  

Our goal for Cesium Ecosystem Grants has been to address common challenges and opportunities through open source contributions and game-changing collaborations within the 3D geospatial ecosystem. The 3D Tiles for Godot plugin is this vision come to life. If you have a similar idea for expanding the 3D geospatial ecosystem and enhancing interoperability, apply for a grant.

Hear from Battle Road at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.

Introducing 3D Tiles for Godot by Battle Road 

This is a guest post by Nef Gonzalez Campos and Brent Elmer of Battle Road. Battle Road built the 3D Tiles for Godot plugin with support from a Cesium Ecosystem Grant.  

At Battle Road, we reap the benefits of open source software through technologies we love and use every day. Some of our favorites include Godot, Kubernetes, Nakama, and, of course, Cesium. That’s why we’re excited to be giving back with the 3D Tiles for Godot plugin, bringing the innovative capabilities of 3D Tiles to the Godot game engine.

This Godot implementation joins the family of Cesium Native offerings already available for other 3D creation engines: Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse. 

Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via 3D Tiles for Godot. Courtesy Battle Road.

Getting a project up and running with the plugin is simple. 

To begin, you need a stable release of Godot 4.1 or newer. Next, head to either the Godot Asset Library or the 3D Tiles for Godot GitHub repository Releases section to find the newest version of the plugin.  

Download the binaries and follow the README starting from the Setting Up a Project section. 

After importing everything to the project and signing into Cesium ion, you are ready to start adding and fetching your geospatial data and imagery! If you run into issues along the way, we invite you to open an issue in the GitHub repo.  

For questions about the plugin, connect with us in the 3D Tiles for Godot category on the Cesium community forum.   

Our next update on sessions and tracks at the Cesium Developer Conference includes two significant sets of community-submitted talks: one focused on Climate and Disaster Resilience and the other on 3D, AI, and Data Technology.

As we saw in the fantastic abstracts submitted by the community, these topics are deeply integrated as emerging technologies and user experiences enable new tools and analyses that we can bring to bear when examining the impacts of climate change and planning for and responding to natural disasters.

Register for the Cesium Developer Conference

We live on a dynamic planet, and open geospatial technologies enable us to monitor, measure, and respond to weather and climate-related changes in the built and natural environment around us.

Both main days of the conference, June 24 and June 25, will feature blocks focused on stories of open technologies applied to climate and risaster Resilience. On the 24th, we’ll kick off our lightning talks with four stories, including using Cesium to simulate the world at +4ºC by Columbia University and building a Cesium-based geospatial search tool for NOAA scientific data. The lightning talks will be given on the conference main stage to the entire audience.

June 25 features a block of 20-minute sessions on related topics. These talks will discuss using open geospatial technologies to build a first responder AR tool, mapping the USS Midway with GeoCam and Cesium, and using OGC GeoPose for real-time collaboration during emergency management operations.

Because the Cesium Developer Conference is a technology-focused event, we would be remiss to not feature tracks and sessions that are oriented at geospatial technologies more generally. The conference will feature blocks of sessions on both days and a block of lightning talks focused on a range of technologies and applications of open data and open geospatial software and standards.

Here are some of the topics that stand out: 

Panoramic images in talks by Virtual City Systems and AerialSphere

Integrating 3D Tiles into the Godot open game engine

Demonstrating cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs in CesiumJS by HoBu

Several sessions on extended reality (XR) and augmented reality (AR)

Integrating CesiumJS and 3D Tiles into open developer tools

Scaling the production of Gaussian splats with Atomic Maps

Using open geospatial technologies to build games with the Athens School of Fine Arts

Philadelphia City Hall at night from Broad Street.

Yes. There are six community and colleague-submitted tracks, represented in full sessions and lightning talks. Plus we have mainstage talks that will cover these topics and more. Find out more about the themed tracks in our blog and on the conference pages.

The full agenda for the conference is now live.

Our speakers are excited to meet up with industry colleagues, share learnings, and hear feedback. Register to attend and connect with the community in Philadelphia. We’ll see you there.

Climate Change, Disaster Resilience, and Technology Converge at the Cesium Developer Conference 

We’re proud to welcome Google Cloud as the technology sponsor and Geospatial World as the knowledge partner for the inaugural Cesium Developer Conference, June 23-25 in Philadelphia.  

Yosemite National Park, California, United States, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles using Cesium for Unity.

We are grateful to be able to announce Google Cloud as the conference technology sponsor. At Cesium and the broader Bentley Systems, we are big fans and users of Google Cloud for the innovation it helps us bring to our customers, including the innovations we harness from Google Maps Platform. This is the 20th anniversary of the launch of Google Maps, a significant industry event that transformed digital mapping. Google Maps Platform is used by millions of websites and apps, not just to solve their geospatial problems but to unlock new capabilities. 

We’re excited to have Sean Wohltman, Google Global Head of Cloud Geography, present on the main stage during the event and share about Google’s recent impacts in the open geospatial market and about their initiatives to continue to deliver valuable spatially connected services and applications into the future.  

In the last two years, Google entered into partnerships with Cesium and Bentley Systems. The Cesium partnership helped bring to the market the availability of Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for users in 2022. Recently, Google and Bentley announced a new initiative connecting Blyncsy to the Google Imagery Platform, which will allow access to Google Street View and Google’s Vertex AI for automated roadway asset identification. 

Geospatial World has been a driving force in geospatial thought leadership. With a mission to enable more sustainable societies, economies, and environments, Geospatial World delivers actionable insights to decision-makers via its Consulting, Events, and Communications divisions—bringing together leaders from government, industry, and academia. At this year’s Cesium Developer Conference, Geospatial World will participate as the Knowledge Partner. 

GW Consulting, the boutique research and intelligence arm of Geospatial World, provides developers, innovators, and organizations with tailored insights through consulting services, syndicated reports, technology and policy analysis, and access to the industry’s first Geospatial Resource Platform. 

The Geospatial World team will present two sessions at the conference, focused on the business value and socioeconomic impact of the open geospatial ecosystem, offering insights into how open data and interoperable tools can unlock real-world outcomes. 

We’re just two months away from celebrating the open ecosystem with you. Join us for the pre-conference workshop, two full days of learning and connecting with leaders and peers, and social opportunities throughout the event. 

Technology and Knowledge Partners for the Cesium Developer Conference  

The overwhelming response to our call for submissions for the first Cesium Developer Conference has us both excited and needing to catch up after weeks of reviewing, sorting, notifying, and organizing sessions! We received over three times the number of submissions we originally had planned for the event, so we ended up making changes to the format of the conference to include more sessions.

The conference is June 23-25 in Philadelphia. Find out more information and register to attend here.

The conference will feature six themed tracks with more than 60 20-minute full talks over both main days of the conference and a block of more than 20 5-minute lightning talks on June 24, highlighting openness and interoperability. Five tracks will run concurrently during the user sessions parts of the agenda. We’ll release talk abstracts in early May so you can carefully plan your days.

Digital twin technologies are revolutionizing architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) project delivery and asset performance. By enabling stakeholders to visualize and analyze projects within a geospatial context, these technologies improve collaboration, boost efficiency, maximize asset performance, and reduce costs. Learn from developers who create innovative solutions for smart planning, construction, and operations, making the infrastructure around us more resilient and reliable.

The global scope of climate change and scale of natural disasters require better understanding and communicating impacts and solutions. Open geospatial technologies enable developers to create innovative approaches for new tools and workflows to help address issues that touch communities everywhere.

Open geospatial technology has become a critical tool in enabling the analysis of Earth, monitoring trade and agriculture, and transforming orbital space into an active commercial and operational environment. Learn from developers who are using 3D geospatial data, game engines, and new experiences to support users in the most challenging domains.

Advances in 3D, AI, and data technologies have rendered geospatial an essential component of applications from social games to autonomy. Thanks to a huge community of developers, open geospatial enables XR experiences, spatially distributed connected systems, analysis of terabytes of Earth observation data, and more.

Delivering high-value experiences and solutions with open geospatial technologies requires an understanding of the trends and opportunities that create maximum impact for new applications, services, and data. For developers and technologists who want to go beyond the “what” and explore the “why,” this track offers a perspective on the market opportunities and impacts of the open geospatial industry.

The teams working on open technologies such as Cesium, iTwin, and 3D Tiles dive into their latest work on topics requested by the community and enabling advances in performance and interoperability. Cesium- and iTwin-related open geospatial technologies are advancing rapidly and powering new applications from the sea floor and into space.

Beyond the six tracks, the conference will feature networking opportunities and intensive training and discussions:

Pre-conference “Cesium Deep Dive” open to 50 attendees

glTF Ecosystem Forum hosted by the Khronos Group

Cesium Certified Developer networking social

Mainstage panel discussion on open standards

Community tables for universities and non-profits

Food and refreshments provided throughout the event

We’re excited to host the open geospatial developer community, and we encourage attendees to register soon. Conference admissions and hotel rooms are filling up fast!

Tracks Announced: Discover and Learn at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference 

We are excited to announce the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference!  

The in-person event, June 23-25 in Philadelphia, PA, USA, is designed to enable the community to connect and share their latest innovations and experiences featuring open technologies that reflect the diversity and impact of the ecosystem, such as geospatial capabilities for 3D creation engines, CesiumJS, iTwin, 3D Tiles, and open data. The conference will be hosted by Bentley Systems and will feature presentations and speakers from across the open geospatial community. 

Philadelphia, home of the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference.

The conference will reflect the inclusiveness and range of the application of geospatial developer technologies applied to digital twins in AEC, the aerospace industry, gaming and simulation, and many other domains. This inaugural event will feature technically oriented, community-driven tracks and a limited-space pre-conference day. 

We encourage the community to submit a lightning talk or full talk, actively participate in sessions, and celebrate openness and interoperability with hundreds of developers and creators at the event. The submission page is here, and the submission window will close February 28, 2025. 

General conference registration will open up in February. 

We’re excited to be able to host the event this year! The community has guided Cesium’s progress, and we look forward to working together to make connections and grow the open ecosystem further through the conference. 

Use this form to submit your presentation, or drop us a line at hello@cesium.com to tell us what matters most to you. 

Updated February 24, 2025: We extended the talk submission deadline after initially publishing this blog.

Present at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference

We are pleased to announce the release of the Cesium Design Tiler and Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In. This release provides new tools to improve workflows and provide new capabilities that place architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) content in a 3D geospatial context.

The Cesium Design Tiler and Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In are now available.

Cesium Design Tiler

These tools transform IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and Revit files into 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets. 

The Design Tiler and Revit Add-In provide easier, more efficient workflows for sharing your design data via the web or other visualization platforms like Unreal Engine, Unity, and NVIDIA Omniverse. By incorporating Cesium and 3D Tiles, you are now able to quickly and easily share your data, making it more accessible while also creating more performant applications.

The new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In improve workflows and capabilities that place AECO content in a 3D geospatial context.

Cesium Roadmap for Bridging the Built and Natural Environment

3D Globe View Now Available in QGIS

Ansys Uses Cesium ion Self-Hosted for Geospatial Data Cloud

Introducing 3D Tiles for Godot by Battle Road

Getting Started with 3D Tiles for Godot

Climate Change, Disaster Resilience, and Technology Converge at the Cesium Developer Conference

Technology and Knowledge Partners for the Cesium Developer Conference