I just posted a feature request on the Blender Community forum and thought cross-posting it here would be great to inform the Cesium team - or anyone really interested in seeing this happen. Following the Cesium for Unreal plugin developed by Cesium/Unreal teams - or the Cesium for O2DE plugin - the open-source community would clearly benefit from having a way to view and render OGC 3D Tiles scenes within the Blender viewport.
Being able to stream 3D Tiles datasets from the local filesystem or a web server, in a georeferenced scene - the way you do it within Unreal - directly within Blender could be a real open-source way to display and render from 3D tiles - and might as well push further the need for Cesium Ion storage service for your customers.
There are probably ways to make this work step after step, also gaining inspiration from the way the BlenderGIS plugin does stream 2D Tiles from remote fetched URLs - see the gif below for inspiration.
Thanks for sharing this and cross referencing it. Its certainly aligned with Cesium vision to see 3D Tiles runtime as part of many engines. We’d love to follow the discussion and be able to help as we can. This will help us gauge the interest from the community and understand the various use cases and how Cesium can help address those.
Also CCing @sean_lilley, who leads the 3D Tiles efforts at Cesium for awareness.
Out of curiosity, were you already using 3D Tiles previously? How does Blender fit into your pipeline?
Hi Shehzan,
Thanks for the positive feedback. Indeed the 3D Tiles standard could become the backbone of massive datasets viewing/rendering the way glTF has become a pretty universal way to share single 3D assets on the web right now.
We’ve been experimenting with 3D Tiles for quite some time now at Iconem.
Internally, on the rendering side, we mostly switched from using static meshes to using massive pointclouds since their density is sufficient for most uses (immersive exhibitions, standard 3D renders and videos, etc), and it means avoiding producing different versions of the same assets depending on the camera frustum and paths. We’ve been building bridges between our platform and CloudCompare a few years back to easen the production of 3D renders with pointclouds in CC.
We have a platform, app.iconem.com, which uses Potree under the hood, and have been exploring tiled meshes generated via Cesium Ion in the beginning and then Metashape/RealityCapture.
Regarding Blender, we’ve been using it since day one internally, initially for renders, then for exhibitions - for examples Sites Eternels in Paris - as well as for different portions of our pipeline today - some stereoscopic 360 renders on the Giza pyramids for example, prototyping scenography for our exhibitions, etc.
If Blender was to support 3D Tiles, either meshes or pointclouds, this would open up a large spectrum of possibilities for us and the community, both on the materials we could create, animations, using tools we are definitely more accustomed to, with a rendering engine that has proven to be the best open-source solution for 3D content creation.
Hi @Shehzan_Mohammed,
Since that original post ~1 year ago, the cesium team has been pretty busy, and other 3D engines have seen the development of a 3D Tiles plugin from Cesium - Unity, Omniverse, O3DE. Do you think blender might be next on that list? Would be great to get support on the most used OSS render engine most used by studios - either tiled pointclouds or meshes.
Thanks a lot for getting back, and again for the great work,
Jonathan
Blender is definitely remains interesting to Cesium, but like you like, we’ve been pretty busy with the core of runtime engines we’ve published and to maintain and improve them. So at this time, we don’t have any plans to add new first-party integrations to any other engines for this year.
That said, we’re more than happy to work with the community and provide direction on how to integrate 3D Tiles into other engines. For example, we recently announced our Ecosystem Grants program and funded a 3D Tiles integration for QGIS. If you (or anyone in the Blender community) are interested, please apply and Cesium will review the application.
Sorry I don’t have a better update, but if anything changes, you’ll hear it here first!
From my point-of-view it’s a really valuable update, that’s important to get that feedback from the official Cesium team, thanks for that and the clarification! Fingers crossed the Blender integration will happen at some point - your joint move with Google for photorealistic 3dtiles might make things move faster since Blender is the essential 3d engine for lots of studios among the most recognized.
I’ve seen the grant for Qgis integration, which is also a great news - there is some interrogation as to why North-Road did receive the grant while Oslandia had already undertaken large part of the work towards complete integration, but it’s a great step in the right direction - see Streaming large 3D dataset, support for 3Dtiles · Issue #225 · qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals · GitHub.
Support for OGC 3Dtiles by major software vendors, oss or proprietary, for broader use of the standard specification is the way to go for streamlined adoption. Thanks again to the whole team for all your efforts!
Hi all… I am new here, but am a 3D tiles user. I wanted to mention that there is now a plug in for Blender called Blosm that enables integration with Google’s 3D Tiles (as well as OSM).
Thanks Nate, this plugin is useful to download crops of a 3D-tiles tileset (Google or custom tileset endpoint), but not to stream depending on the camera position within the viewport in order to reach a target screenSpaceError, the way the plugins for the other renderers allow it.
Just cross-posting a recent twitter discussion, suggestion by Patrick is to rely on the open-source Cesium Native C++ library that streams 3D Tiles (used in Cesium plugins for Unreal, Unity, Omniverse).
My two cents before that suggestion were:
to implement a plugin the way BlenderGIS does it for standard 2D TMS tile maps, full pythonic