Caching Cesium Tiles for Offline Usage

CesiumJS
1

Hello Everyone,

I am working on a project in the Industrial Engineering department of my University and for an upcoming IE conference in May we would like to showcase a drone simulation project we have been working on. The concern is that due to limited bandwidth we will not have optimal performance to show the simulator.

My Question:

After some research it would seem that using Cesium Terrain Server https://github.com/geo-data/cesium-terrain-server

Along with Cesium Terrain Builder
https://github.com/geo-data/cesium-terrain-builder

Will allow us to host and serve the tiles. My confusion is how we generate the actual tile data. e.g. 20x20 square distance from lat/lon coords using x zoom levels.

From the Cesium Terrain Builder information it would seem I need to create GDAL raster representing a Digital Elevation Model (DEM).

How do I create an input raster?

Lastly, is there a better way to use cached tile data for offline use?

Thanks,

2

Caching tile data for later use is usually against the terms of use for most commercial imagery providers, just FYI.

3

Yes, downloading tile data from the STK World Terrain dataset is against the terms of use. You can read more about the terms of use for this tileset here: http://cesiumjs.org/data-and-assets/terrain/stk-world-terrain.html#TermsOfUse

However, if you have your own terrain data you can use tools like the Cesium Terrain Builder to create a local tileset (note that this software was not created or maintained by the Cesium team so I’m not very familiar with the specifics on how it works)

AGI (The company that employs most of the Cesium team) has a commercial product called the STK Terrain Server that can process raw terrain data into the quantized mesh terrain format used by the CesiumTerrainProvider for local use. If you would like to know more about this product please send an email to todd@agi.com

Best,

Hannah

4

Right you are, Hannah.

Jeff,

If your team / school has the means, would highly recommend a purchase of STK Terrain Server, it’s well worth the $$, and will save you a lot of time / headaches.

As a purely technical suggestion, you might want to try gdaltranslate and gdaldem to translate vector DEMs to raster.

-TJ

5

Thanks TJ!

6

Thank you for the information