Compatibility of Google's 3D Photorealistic Tiles with Entity Plotting, Interaction, and Custom 3D Assets

CesiumJS
1

Hi Cesium Community,

I’m exploring the possibility of integrating Google’s 3D photorealistic tiles into our application and would appreciate your insights on a few aspects of compatibility and functionality.

Our application currently supports plotting and interacting with various entities such as billboards, polylines, circles and polygons. Maintaining the existing visual style and interactive features of these entities is crucial for us.

Additionally, we’re considering the use of custom 3D assets placed on top of the 3D tiles. I’d like to understand the following:

  • Are Google’s 3D photorealistic tiles fully compatible with Cesium for plotting and manipulating entities?
  • Are there any potential issues or limitations when integrating these tiles, particularly concerning entity interaction and custom 3D asset placement?
  • What challenges might we face in maintaining our current visual style and interactivity with these tiles, as well as when using custom 3D assets?

Any advice or experiences shared would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

2

Hi @Abhishek_Aneja,

Thank you for your post and apologies for the delayed response.

First I wanted to ask if your application currently uses 3DTiles or only uses terrain as the “base layer” on top of the globe? If you are already using 3DTiles, you should find the transition to Google’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles to be pretty seamless, because it is just switching from one 3DTileset to another.

If you are switching from terrain to 3DTiles, you may find some differences. For example draping imagery over 3D Tiles is currently not supported but very likely to be worked on on the near term Drape imagery over 3D Tiles · Issue #7591 · CesiumGS/cesium · GitHub. You may find these sandcastle examples helpful covering how to clamp Entities Cesium Sandcastle and Models Cesium Sandcastle to ground on terrain versus 3dTiles.

Please let us know if you run into issues or have questions about specific issues along the way.

Best,
Luke