Early Access: New Design Formats in Cesium ion

General
1

We’re opening early access for newly supported design formats in Cesium ion and are excited to work with the community to validate real‑world workflows as we continue iterating.

This early access adds support for the following formats:

  • DWG (.dwg)

  • DXF (.dxf)

  • Rhino (.3dm)

  • Revit (.rvt)

  • IFC (.ifc)

For previously supported formats, early access provides new ingestion pathways:

  • Revit is supported via drag‑and‑drop in the Cesium ion UI as well as through the ion API.

  • IFC includes both the new ingestion path and the existing Design Tiler.

Early access is focused on validating usability, performance, and practical workflows using real design data.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: Participate in early access testing.

Thanks for collaborating with us as we bring design workflows into Cesium.

— Roop

2

This is a very welcome update — especially the expansion beyond just geospatial-friendly formats into full AEC/CAD pipelines.

Supporting DWG/DXF alongside Rhino, Revit, and IFC basically bridges a long-standing gap between design tools and real-time 3D streaming environments. In practice, IFC support alone is already a big deal for interoperability, so adding multiple ingestion paths (UI + API + Design Tiler) makes it much more usable in real production workflows.

3

This is great news for Rhino users!
I work in Rhino Technical Support at AppliCraft, the official Rhinoceros distributor in Japan, and I’ve been exploring workflows connecting Rhino, GIS, and Cesium. So far, I’ve been using a georeferenced KMZ-based workflow, so I’m particularly interested in the Early Access support for Rhino (.3dm).
I recently shared some of my current experiments here:
Rhino Models in Cesium — General

Do you have any plans or an approximate timeline for making Rhino (.3dm) an officially supported format in Cesium ion?

4

Thanks for sharing your workflow and experiments. It’s great to see interest from the Rhino community.

We don’t have a timeline to share for official Rhino (.3dm) support in Cesium ion today. That said, we plan to continue expanding support for additional design and engineering formats over time, and Rhino is a format we’re happy to include in our ongoing experimentation and evaluation.

5

Thanks @Roop_Saini, that’s very helpful to know.

I’ll keep following the development of direct Rhino (.3dm) support in Cesium ion.
In parallel, I’ve been developing and testing a bidirectional workflow between Rhino and Cesium, focusing on maintaining geographic position, height, and orientation as 3D content moves between Rhino’s local modelling environment and Cesium’s global geospatial environment.

I’m also interested in how these approaches could complement each other in the future — direct .3dm support could simplify the transfer of Rhino content, while the bidirectional workflow addresses how its geographic relationship is maintained between the two environments.

I’ll continue testing this from the Rhino side and share the results with the community as the workflow develops.

Thanks again for the update!

6

Hi Roop, uploading RVT works well, but the location editor is not activated after upload. Strangely calling it in Stories on the same asset will work - but: saving the location does not…
Thx
Christof