Difference In Cesuim3DTileset from Cesium Ion Terrain and from Ellipsoid

[janine]

Hi @milansoliya,

Cesium for Unreal is based on the WGS84 ellipsoid model, where the georeference’s “height” refers to the distance above the ellipsoid. The “From Ellipsoid” option generates a smooth surface representing the WGS84 ellipsoid. On the other hand, Cesium World Terrain is real-world elevation data that will vary in distance from the ellipsoid.

Currently, the plugin does not have any built-in ways of converting WGS84 height to Mean Sea Level, but there are some suggestions on the forum for implementing this, such as Kevin’s below:

Best practices for obtaining real world lat, long, height, and converting that into UE4 coordinates

Hi @nbaja, This is a very common problem. When you look up a height on Wikipedia and elsewhere, it’s almost always a height above sea level. “Sea level” is a bit of a fuzzy concept. It’s made concrete (at least a “mean” sea level is) by various geoid models, but geoid models are messy and irregular. Instead, Cesium uses heights above the WGS84 ellipsoid. This is a nice mathematical approximation of the Earth’s shape, used by GPS and many other things. This definitely doesn’t mean Cesium is inac…

Let us know if that helps!