New camera flights in Cesium 1.11

CesiumJS
1

In Cesium 1.11 on July 1, we plan to release a new version of camera flights that provide more consistent paths regardless of the start and end position/orientation.

We are interested in your feedback. Using the flights branch, try the Geocoder widget, Sandcastle camera example, or even your own app, and let us know what you think of the new flights. Feel free to reply to this thread or comment directly in the pull request.

Thanks,

Patrick

2

Will this include the feature of Flaying from A to B at same elevation i.e. without the current Kangaroo Hop effect? If so, I am eagerly awaiting this development.

More power to you.

Cheers,
Gaurav

3

Hi Patrick,

This is a great improvement!!

With Google Earth, the path was usually at a lower altitude, with the camera pointed to the target. But this path will work fur us too, have to get used to it :-).

For background; in our application you can e.g. fly from one destination/harbour of the boat’s itinerary to the next one, so the GE path was quite nice in that situation.

I hope to have some more time to test next week.

Regards, Willem

4

Hi Patrick,

I have the impression that using a pitch of -90 gives a result with an incorrect heading more often than in v1.10. I am aware this is an existing issue, not sure if v1.11 is supposed to fix it.

I used headingDegrees= 0, pitchDegrees= -90 and rangeMeters= 10000, flying to a .gltf entity.

Willem

5

Willem, you are correct in that this is supposed to fix the issue described here: https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/cesium/issues/2468 I just tested it and it looks like there are still problems. Hopefully we’ll be able to have the fix in before 1.11 on Wednesday.

6

Gaurav,

This will still have the kangaroo hop effect, but there is an option to override the maximum height the camera can reach. If the points at A and B have the same height, you can set the maximum height to that an it will remain constant across the flight.

Dan

7

Thanks for the clarification Dan. I guess this means more power to customize the flight. But I sincerely hope that in some future version of Cesium, even this becomes optional like they have it in the case of Google Earth.

Because, at least in my use cases, flight paths are created on user interaction and I am already flying somewhat high above the terrain to bother for the elevation of each point and even fetching those would be an added chore and load for the program.

Cheers,
Gaurav

8

Are there plans to add the maximumHeight option to the viewer.flyTo(target, options) method? At the moment it is only available for camera.flyTo().

Thanks, Willem

9

Hi Willem,

I submitted #2868 for this.

Patrick