Cesium + Isaac Sim: Terrain goes black at drone scale (10-500ft) — Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles not loading close up

Cesium for Omniverse
1

Hi all,

I’ve got Isaac Sim 5.1.0 running with Cesium for Omniverse and PX4 SITL for drone simulation. The setup is working well — Cesium World Terrain + Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles are loading, PX4 is connecting via MAVLink, and QGroundControl is talking to the simulator.

My issue is resolution at low altitude. For drone operations in the 10–500ft AGL range, the Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles don’t have enough geometric or texture detail to be useful. When I zoom the Isaac Sim viewport in close to where the drone is, the terrain goes completely black — no tiles load at that proximity. At slightly higher altitudes the tiles are blocky and textures are blurry. Fine for city-scale visualization, but not usable for simulating real low-altitude drone flight where you need to see rooftops, trees, and ground features clearly.

A few questions:

  1. Is there a higher-resolution Cesium ion asset that works better at drone scale (zoom level 18–20 equivalent)?
  2. Has anyone successfully used local photogrammetry datasets (e.g. from OpenDroneMap or RealityCapture) as a Cesium 3D Tileset in Isaac Sim?
  3. Is there a recommended workflow for getting high-res terrain into Isaac Sim for low-altitude drone simulation — either through Cesium or by importing a USD/OBJ mesh directly?
  4. Any experience with Mapbox or USGS 3DEP data at this scale?

Happy to share more details about the setup if helpful. Thanks!

2

Hi @vyalla, welcome to the forum!

  1. Some higher res assets are available in the Cesium ion Asset Depot but they are for specific cities. If you can’t find what you’re looking for you may need to reach out to data providers like Aerometrex, Nearmap, and others who specialize in local photogammetry capture.
  2. Yes, it’s possible to load local photogrammetry datasets into Isaac Sim. The data can either be hosted locally on your filesystem or in Cesium ion. If the data isn’t already georeferenced you can use the CesiumGeoreference prim to assign it a latitude/longitude/height.
  3. If the OBJ is very large the best approach would be be to convert it into 3D Tiles with Cesium ion. Otherwise, you could try loading the OBJ directly into Omniverse.
  4. No experience with those datasets personally, though you may may able to upload 3DEP data to Cesium ion.