Hey there!
The use case I intend to use Cesium for is to create an interactive playground for raising and lowering the sea level in various locations of hi-resolution imagery. As I know Cesium for Unreal currently only has the ability to alter materials, and not have an actual ‘ocean’ object or plane, I intend to create a spheroid that is duplicate to the one used for Cesium and slave the properties of the duplicate to the cesium reference.
Is there an easy way to return the properties of the spheroid and how it’s manipulated?
Cesium for Unreal uses the standard WGS84 ellipsoid. Search the code for Ellipsoid::WGS84. However, the ellipsoid is not an accurate representation of the sea level surface. You’ll need a more complicated shape if you want to represent sea level accurately.
I understand, the area would be fairly local and can adjusted to follow the camera, my intent is to preserve curvature at slightly larger scales, where a plane would clip through the surface of the earth.
If I were to create a sphere with a portion of high resolution, and rotate the sphere to follow the camera, would this be a good start for a ‘realistic’ ocean without using a plane? Similar to a wandering clipmask to preserve detail.
Depends on your needs, but it might work. If you need something more accurate, you could upload a GeoTIFF filled with geoid heights (EGM2008, for example) to Cesium ion and let it tile it as terrain. Then add a Cesium3DTileset in Cesium for Unreal and point it at the ion-created asset. Set the material property on the tileset in order to return this new “terrain” as water.