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STK

Prerequisites

  • Have a running instance of STK 11.7 or newer.
  • You need a Cesium ion account to take this tutorial.

1Add data to your Cesium ion account

The first step is to add some 3D data to your Cesium ion account that we’ll later stream to STK.

Login or create an account on Cesium ion, then navigate to the Asset Depot. This is where you can find curated 3D Tiles, terrain and imagery that you can add to your account.

Find the Vricon 3D Surface Model - Cairo asset and click the “+” button to add it to your account:

Integrating with STK Vricon depot
Information

You can also upload your own 3D data to your Cesium ion account. Read about the types of data that Cesium ion currently supports.

2Connect your Cesium ion account

To give STK acess to read data from your Cesium ion account, you need to create an access token.

In your Cesium ion dashboard, navigate to the Access Tokens page. Then click the Create Token button.

Integrating with STK Create Token

Give your new token a name and read/list access to your assets as shown below.

Integrating with STK token permissions

Click Create and then copy your newly created token from the panel on the right.

Integrating with STK Copy Token

3Add your Cesium ion token to STK

Open up STK and click on Edit > Preferences:

Integrating with STK STK preferences

In the preferences window, select Data Services on the left-side menu. Then double click on the Cesium ion service.

Integrating with STK STK data services

Here is where you can add the access token you created in Cesium ion earlier. Click the “+” button to add the token. Name it “Demo” and paste the token itself in the “Value” column as shown below.

Integrating with STK STK token

Press OK to confirm. Your STK instance now has access to the data in your Cesium ion account.

4Add a 3D Tileset to your STK scene

Now that we’ve connected STK with Cesium ion, we can add a 3D Tileset to the scene. Click on the “+” button in the Globe Manager panel in the bottom left of the screen, and select Add 3D Tilesets… as shown below.

Integrating with STK STK add tileset

In the new window, click on the Hosted button and then select Cesium ion from the server drop down. This will show you all the 3D Tilesets that are available using the configured access token.

Integrating with STK STK tileset list

You can select one or more 3D Tilesets in this list, then click Add.

Finally, you can zoom to your 3D Tileset by right clicking on it in the Globe Manager panel and selecting Zoom To. You now have a 3D Tileset streaming inside of STK as you move the camera around.

Integrating with STK STK cairo
Information

STK currently supports 3D Tiles that contain photogrammetry and 3D buildings. Support for point cloud tilesets is currently under development.

Next steps

Now that you’ve set up STK to pull 3D Tiles from Cesium ion, you can use this to quickly access highly detailed 3D content without having to transfer these massive datasets around.

STK can export the results of your analysis as a CZML document that can be viewed on the web with CesiumJS. This way you can share a full interactive 3D scene since the data is already hosted in the cloud. Learn about how to export your data in the CZML Exporter section of the STK documentation.

Content and code examples at cesium.com/learn are available under the Apache 2.0 license. You can use the code examples in your commercial or non-commercial applications.