Cesium in 2018 - what do you want to see?

CesiumJS
61

Hi Fabien,

To address each of your bullets:

built-in measuring tools: length (including “real” length including with the terrain), surface area and volume (over and below a plane)

This (and generally more “analytical” tools) is something we will offer as part of our commercial platform.

visualizing underground features (such as pipes)

We’ve been slowly making additions to CesiumJS that allow underground visualization, including making the globe materials transparent and clipping planes. There are some more modifications that we would like to tackle soon, like improving underground camera support. The issue is being tracked in GitHub that you can follow, #5665.

Using a global terrain provider and a local terrain provider. For instance, using a MNT/MNE that you have on a specific area, as stated in other post in this threads

We discuss this in detail in this thread, see above comments.

viewshed / field of view analysis

Again, this is an analytical tool we are looking to include in our commercial offerings.

more tutorials on how to have textured 3D buildings displayed in Cesium

Can you be more specific here? Do you mean tutorials on using 3D Tiles? Or for using textures in cesium in general?

Video recording of a scene animation (fly-to, stops, etc.)

You mean capturing video from Cesium directly? There are a some thread which discuss writing some extensions to do this, but we don’t have any immediate plans to create a tool for that. We do have some better camera flight tools on our radar.

import/export in standard formats (3DS, Collada, KMZ, CityGML, etc.)

Importing other data formats, processing, and converting them to glTF and 3D Tiles for use in Cesium is part of the planned offerings for our commercial product.

Thanks for the feedback! I think generally the response is that analytical and offline processing will be part of our commercial offerings, while the open source CesiumJS will cover the visualization aspects.

62

Thanks Gabby for this detailed answer. Looks like the Cesium commercial offer is what we’ll need. I subscribed to the beta months ago and never got an answer. Also contacter Tim two days ago but no answer yet …

Fabien

63

Hi,

My suggestion is related with the website of Cesium and not with the library. It would be great if the sample code on the tutorials could be copied to the clipboard. I have seen in many websites with tutorials that they have a small button on the top right corner of the snippet and allows you to copy the code in your clipboard.

Thanks

64

Hey bampakoa,

Website suggestions are also welcome! Good idea, I’ll note it.

Thanks!

Gabby

65

+1 Postprocessing
+1 Multiple TerrainProviders
+1 Typescript definitions
+1 Entity Z ordering
+1 Improved rendering performance
+1 Decreased CPU usage
+1 ES6 modules
+1 Integration with three.js/BabylonJS/A-Frame - would allow AAA effects and perhaps more convenient 3D model imports

- More realistic atmospheric scattering and fog a la https://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/05/28/atmospheric-scattering-in-the-blacksmith/

- A better gtTF with custom shader generation pipeline. Right now we have to paste our shaders (base64 encoded) into the glTF after it is converted. But doing so makes the models unpickable because Cesium does some string replacing code to add a picking mode to the shader, which is not compatible with our custom shader. Using czm_ automatic uniforms should be easy in this pipeline.

- It would help alot if the multiple frustum rendering process could be reduced to only one frustum. Having multiple frustums makes many standard rendering techniques impossible. We would like Cesium to get more AAA rendering quality. Implementing our own shaders seems like the fastest path, which would be eased tremendously by having only a single frustum. But another path to AAA rendering is also an option, like the mentioned three.js (or other) integration.

66

Hi!

Is it possible to enhance Cesium to drop shadows from big objects?
I see in this thread https://cesiumjs.org/forum/#!msg/cesium-dev/INkyXhFVcf4/iS6QyZckDwAJ that "eventually" it was going to be supported, but I don't know if you are already working on it.

It would be really appreciated! :slight_smile:

67

Thanks for the input Laurens!

More realistic atmospheric scattering and fog a la https://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/05/28/atmospheric-scattering-in-the-blacksmith/

The atmospheric effect look super cool! While it’s not on the roadmap right now, if we were able to collaborate or get additional funding we may be able to tackle that.

A better gtTF with custom shader generation pipeline. Right now we have to paste our shaders (base64 encoded) into the glTF after it is converted. But doing so makes the models unpickable because Cesium does some string replacing code to add a picking mode to the shader, which is not compatible with our custom shader. Using czm_ automatic uniforms should be easy in this pipeline.

You’re right that our shader pipeline is not necessarily ideal. I’ve opened issue #6329 to track.

It would help alot if the multiple frustum rendering process could be reduced to only one frustum. Having multiple frustums makes many standard rendering techniques impossible. We would like Cesium to get more AAA rendering quality. Implementing our own shaders seems like the fastest path, which would be eased tremendously by having only a single frustum. But another path to AAA rendering is also an option, like the mentioned three.js (or other) integration.

For rendering on a global scale, generally multiple frustums are necessary. We are making some improvements in #5851 that makes the primary frustum larger, if that is relevant to what you are trying to accomplish. We’d be interested in hearing your use case if you’d like to open a separate thread!

Thanks,

Gabby

68

Hi kalintro,

We haven’t done any further work on this, but I’ve opened #6330 to track.

Thanks for bumping the suggestion!

Gabby

69

Hi all,

Qandeel asked about the ability to simulate weather like rain and clouds, but the message was flagged by Google’s spam filter and I apparently did not unspamify it correctly.

We are currently working on particle system tutorials that should help for things like rain (branch). Clouds are also on the roadmap but will be longer term, keep an eye on #5962.

Thanks,

Patrick

70

For 3DTiles vector , I would like to see changing polyline width(pixel) at runtime using 3d tiles style syntax(Currently pixel width baked during vectorData pipeline.(TileFormats/VectorData))

For example(style):

{

“polylineWidth” : “${LINE_NUMBER}”,

}

Thanks, shyoo

71

I would like to see the effect in cesium, similar to the following effect: http://gallery.echartsjs.com/editor.html?c=xS170NCrSZ

1 Like
72

Shyoo, that is indeed on the roadmap for styling 3D Vector Data! See 3d-tiles Issue #25.

chkspeaker, Interesting effect! Maybe that’s something that could be achieved with Polylines and a custom material.

73

Hello,

Is there a possibility to see in Cesium the "measure" tools ?

For measuring size, area or even volume. It's could be very usefull with scalable model or even georeferenced model.

Greetings,

Yohann

74

Hi Yohann,

We are aiming to include analytical tools like the measurements you describe in our Cesium ion platform.

Thanks!

Gabby

75

Hi Gabby,

Thanks for the answer! I was looking the description of cesium ion when you answer me (I was too slow to erase the message). Does the basic analytical measurement (like distance and area)tools will be in the free Ion service? Or it will be in the Ion+ account?

Yohann

76

We’re not sure yet, (we’re still nailing down the details of our offerings), but it could potentially be offered as part of the base free ion account.

77

Could be interesting to juste have the base like distance and area measurement. I'm a surveyor, si too show the model or make measurement on my model, it could be great).

Orthers proposition: it's possible to make simulation of waterflood? Or even simulation of car on road? (I haven't check the information about this..)

Greetings,
Yohann

78

Thanks for the use case, it’s good to know!

What do you mean by waterflood? Can you explain or provide an example?

It’s indeed possible to simulate a car on a road, see some of the work we’ve done with Autonomous Cars.

79

Hi,

What i mean by waterflood (or flood) is something like this link (look at 7min 45sec) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkBS0H8MyM8 .
It's a simulation done in arcgis. The idea would be to do this on cesium (now that the terrain is available). If we take in account the size of the tileset and the terrain, can make a simulation of water on a site?

For the autonomous car, what i was thinking was just to put car inside the model to simulate road activity on a tileset.

Greetings,
Yohann

80

Ok, I see. You should be able to do something similar in Cesium using a plane and depth testing against the terrain. I’d suggest opening a new thread if you want to discuss how to accomplish that effect in more detail.