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Cesium World Terrain

The Grand Canyon in Cesium World Terrain

Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona

Glenn Canyon in Cesium World Terrain

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Utah

A mountain glacier in Cesium World Terrain

Glacier National Park, Montana

Snowdonia National Park, Wales

The Himalayas In Cesium World Terrain

Himalaya Mountain Range, Nepal

Snow-capped mountains of New Zealand in Cesium World Terrain

Mount Aspiring National Park, New Zealand

High resolution global 3D terrain

Cesium World Terrain fuses several data sources into a single quantized-mesh terrain tileset optimized for 3D map visualization and efficient streaming into CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, and other 3D engines.

Cesium World Terrain was curated and tiled for efficient 3D visualization. Leaf tiles contain pre-generated meshes of the highest-resolution source data for that location; level of detail for non-leaf tiles was created with a terrain-specific simplification algorithm that computes geometric error for run-time level-of-detail control.

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Asset specs

Format: quantized-mesh 1.0

Coverage: global

Resolution

CoverageApproximate resolution in meters
England1 m to 2 m
Australia populated areas and coasts5 m
New Zealand8 m
United States West Coast50 cm
United States1 m to 30 m
Canada30 m
Europe30 m
Mexico30 m
Approximately -60 to 60 degrees latitude30 m to 90 m
Entire Earth1,000 m

CesiumJS code example

const viewer = new Cesium.Viewer('container', {
  terrain: Cesium.Terrain.fromWorldTerrain(),
});

Extensions

Cesium World Terrain contains two quantized-mesh extensions.

Water mask

The water mask extension includes coastline data used for rendering water effects.

const viewer = new Cesium.Viewer('container', {
  terrain: Cesium.Terrain.fromWorldTerrain({
    requestWaterMask: true,
  }),
});

Normals

Oct-encoded per-vertex normals provide an efficient encoding of normal vectors that represent the terrain surface’s curvature at the given position. In CesiumJS, normals are used for terrain lighting. This is especially useful for highlighting surface curvature when high-resolution imagery is not used.

const viewer = new Cesium.Viewer('container', {
  terrain: Cesium.Terrain.fromWorldTerrain({
    requestVertexNormals: true,
  }),
});

Terms of use and attribution requirements

To learn about the terms of use and attribution requirements for Cesium World Terrain, see the Cesium ion Terms of Service, Cesium Global 3D Content, and the Content Usage and Attribution Guide.

Sources

Cesium World Terrain includes these data sources, which will automatically be displayed in the attribution list when using Cesium software.

SourceAttribution
NZ 8m Digital Elevation Model (2012)LINZ - Land Information New Zealand
Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Australia derived from LiDAR 5 Metre GridBased on Geoscience Australia material
LIDAR Composite DTM - 1m & 2m© Environment Agency copyright and/or database right 2015. All rights reserved.
Digital Elevation Model over Europe (EU-DEM)Produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union - EU-DEM layers
CGIAR SRTM© CGIAR-CSI
GTOPO30, SRTM, and National Elevation Dataset (NED)Data available from the U.S. Geological Survey

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