EntityCollection performance vs BillboardCollection + LabelCollection

CesiumJS
1

I am trying to plot a large number of entities (50k to 100k or more) and am interested what the best approach is with the latest Cesium?

Should I be using EntityCollection/CustomDataSource or a billboardCollection + a labelCollection

2

I don’t have hard numbers on benchmarks for these two collections. I think both should benefit from the same batching/optimizations. Cesium generally has been moving more towards 3D Tiles for high volumes of data. The idea there being to produce hierarchical levels of detail, so even if you have a 100 million buildings/models/entities, you won’t render all that detail when it’s too far to see anyway, but as you zoom in it’ll load more.

What kind of data are you representing?

3

Most of the time its location data of buildings based on a database search.

So usually its a symbol representing the building + a label with a CustomDataSource

4

Yeah I think this would definitely benefit from 3D Tiling. You can read a bit about 3D Tiles for buildings here:

https://cesium.com/3d-tiling-pipeline/3d-buildings/

This would involve authoring your data as CityGML or 3d models, and then uploading it to cesium.com/ion to tile it. This is how this New York demo works for example:

https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Apps/Sandcastle/?src=3D%20Tiles%20Feature%20Picking.html&label=All

5

Well, I really don't need anything 3d here as we are showing known symbols representing each building type..

So i really just need the billboards and labels.

6

I think in any case you’ll want to do some sort of tiling. Cesium’s support for large amounts of 3D data is currently a lot better than its 2D support, since other map libraries handle 2D quite well.

Have you tried putting the 100k entities/billboards in Cesium yet? It might work well with clustering:

https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Apps/Sandcastle/?src=Clustering.html

You can also enable the frames per second counter to see how well it’s performing by doing:

viewer.scene.debugShowFramesPerSecond = true;

``

I’d be curious to know if it works or what performance you’re seeing.

7

Thanks. I'll give clustering a try.

Quick questions on 3d tiles:

1. Can you dynamically update 3d tiles. Say I was showing airplane locations and wanted to quickly update billboards representing each one. Does 3d tiles have a way to do this or is it more about static data sets?

2. Do 3d tiles have something like billboard images where I can just put a flat image and have it always face the camera?

8
  1. Time dynamic 3D Tiles is definitely on the roadmap. There does exist a Sandcastle code example (https://cesiumjs.org/Cesium/Build/Apps/Sandcastle/?src=Time%20Dynamic%20Point%20Cloud.html) of a time dynamic point cloud, but it is not yet an official part of the specification. See: https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles/issues/102
  2. Not yet. This would come with vector tiles support, which is also on the roadmap. See: https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles/issues/25