To Whom it may concern,
I am new to cesium so I have been reading the CityGML threads and right now i have not find an answer to my question. Does cesium has the capability to read directly CityGML files ?
Thank you,
David
Hello David,
No, Cesium doesn’t have support for CityGML. I would recommend converting this data into the 3D tiles format. You can learn more about the format here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/cesium-dev/tCCooBxpZFU/7hxT_E4pGgAJ
Best,
Hannah
Hi David,
as far as I know there is no direct support for CityGML in Cesium. It would also not make too much sense, because CityGML models can become quite large and the XML encoding is rather difficult / slow to parse for a web browser. Therefore, they should best be converted to a computer graphics format like glTF (or using the new 3D Tiles) for viewing and interaction.
An easy way to visualize CityGML models using Cesium is to use the Open Source 3D Geodatabase called 3DCityDB from http://www.3dcitydb.net. It is based on either PostGIS or Oracle Spatial (PostGIS is also Open Source). The CityGML dataset can be directly imported into 3DCityDB and then an export in glTF format using tiling can be performed. Since the latest release 3.3 of 3DCityDB (September 2016) we have included a Cesium-based 3D Viewer which then can visualize the exported glTF tileset. See https://github.com/3dcitydb/3dcitydb-web-map and scroll down the page to explore many interactive demos.
We recently published also a hands-on tutorial providing a step-by-step introduction starting from downloading and installing the software packages over importing the CityGML datasets until the glTF export of the dataset and setting up the viewer. The tutorial can be viewed and downloaded from here: http://www.gis.bgu.tum.de/en/projects/3dcitydb/#c1425
Hope this helps,
kind regards
Thomas H. Kolbe