How to obtain pre-built quantized-mesh .terrain tiles for offline local serving with CesiumJS?

CesiumJS
1

Hi,

I’m building an offline CesiumJS application and need to display terrain without any internet dependency.

I attempted to generate terrain tiles from a local GeoTIFF using Cesium Terrain Builder (CTB), but the output tiles had no meaningful elevation data — terrain was essentially flat. I also have a small number of .terrain tiles that were previously downloaded by a colleague, but not nearly enough coverage for my needs.

My question is: is there a source where I can download pre-built quantized-mesh .terrain tiles (the format used by CesiumTerrainProvider) for a broader area?

Ideally looking for:

  • Free or open-source options if they exist

  • Commercial options that allow self-hosting with a simple static file server (not requiring proprietary server software)
    Also open to suggestions on why CTB may have produced flat tiles from a valid GeoTIFF — happy to troubleshoot that route if it’s viable.
    Any guidance appreciated. Thanks!

2

CTB is a bit tricky to get working, I got it working using Docker image tumgis/ctb-quantized-mesh - Docker Image

And commands:

// create terrain tiles
ctb-tile -v -f Mesh -C -N -o output input.vrt
// create layer.json
ctb-tile -f Mesh -C -N -c 1 -l -o output input.vrt

3

I am not aware of any pre-built quantized-mesh .terrain tiles that you could use. I would say the best approach is use CTB and generate from open DEM data. You should be able to obtain data from these below:

Commercially, there is Cesium Ion Self-Hosted which is a self-hosted version Cesium Ion complete with tiling capability, you could host it on the same machine or a different machine on the same network for your use case.

I believe Cesium Terrain Builder is the only open source option, however I would note that Cesium Terrain Builder is not affiliated with Cesium. You could ask on their GitHub page regarding your issues with the tool: https://github.com/geo-data/cesium-terrain-builder

4

Thank you! While searching this forum, I came across this link, is it yours? I am going to try to follow it+ your comment from above. VISUALIZING TERRAINS WITH CESIUM II | bert

5

yes there are a few versions of this blog, hope it still works somewhat :slight_smile: