How to limit tiles within a certain radius?

[Robin_Op_de_Beek]

I would like to simply load in a specific location from a set of coordinates and a radius (e.g. 2 km), and then have Cesium load only the tiles within that radius. Currently it loads way more tiles than I need and this unnecessarily adds performance costs and rapidly fills up the quota.

[Kevin_Ring]

I’ve previously answered this here:

Distance tile load setting

There’s currently not a way to do this. We often get this request, but it would be much less useful than people think. The reason is twofold. First, it wouldn’t reduce bandwidth and load times as much as you might expect. Because of 3D Tiles’ hierarchical LOD structure, tiles in the distance are bigger and lower resolution, and there are far fewer of them. So skipping them entirely would only reduce the total number of tiles a little bit. It wouldn’t make a big difference. Second, setting a di…

It’s in the context of Cesium for Unreal, but the same answer applies in Unity.

[Robin_Op_de_Beek]

Thanks for the response and explanation. I agree that it makes a lot of sense in most cases and those optimizations do give me more confidence. However for my use case I only want to give a preview for specific building sites for placement with the ARCore Geospatial API. A radius of 300-500m will be more than enough in most cases. Of course you would then see the edges, for which I plan to do a radial fade out with a custom material (thanks for that option btw ).
I looked at the amount of meshes for a sample area with a radius of 300m, which would require 300-400 Meshes. This is significantly less than the 2600 meshes that are currently loaded.
I also don’t want to use the frustrum culling for smoother experience, which would also benefit much from less meshes in the scene. Essentially I don’t mind it not being a fully immersed world. Just a top down preview of the site is what I am looking for.
This use case considered, plus the requests from the other people, I hope that you reconsider implementing a feature like this.

[janine]

Are you already using the CesiumTileExcluder interface? I couldn’t tell from your answer if you had tried it, so I thought to mention it just in case.

CesiumTileExcluder can be implemented to exclude tiles with custom rules, e.g., excluding tiles that fall outside a specified bounding volume. There’s an example in the PR description here.

[Robin_Op_de_Beek]

Hi Janine,

Thanks! I was unaware of this functionality. I will try it out

• I just read the conversation in the PR and I think this is exactly what I’m looking for

[Robin_Op_de_Beek]

The CesiumTileExcluder works like a charm, thank you!

If I could ask one follow up question: I also followed the instructions in the PR on how to create a clipping material, but when I apply this to the Opaque material field it all becomes black. Even when I simply drag in the CesiumDefaultTilesetMaterial straight from the Package folder.

Opaque Material = None

Opague Material = CesiumDefaultTilesetMaterial (from package folder)

Opaque Material = CesiumDefaultTilesetMaterial + Generate Smooth Normal = TRUE

Anything I should be doing differently?

Sidenote: also receiving a lot of these errors when assigning Opaque Material:

[janine]

If you’re using Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, you’ll have to use the unlit version of the material instead. Otherwise, you’re trying to use a lit shader on a tileset without normals, which will cause rendering issues.

The latter is a known bug, but we can’t reliably replicate it so it’s hard to figure out where the issue is coming from. Apologies for the console noise

[Robin_Op_de_Beek]

The unlit version works, thanks!