Overlay Bing Imagery on Cesium World Terrain + OSM Buildings

Cesium for Unreal
1

Hi,

I’m new to Cesium for Unreal and was wondering is there a way to drape Bing Maps Aerial imagery over both Cesium World Terrain and the Cesium OSM Buildings (e.g. so that the buildings are coloured based on the bing imagery, rather than appearing solid white as shown in the attached screenshot?). I guess the imagery would become rather stretched draped on the building walls, but I’d be interested to see how it looks from afar.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Screenshot
Screenshot1920×1060 122 KB

2

Hi @Luke_Mahoney,

I just so happens we added that feature in v1.8.0, which was released this week. Just copy/paste the Bing Maps overlay component from the Cesium World Terrain Actor to the Cesium OSM Buildings Actor and you should be good to go.

Kevin

2 Likes
3

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for getting back to me. I’ve copied the Bing Maps Aerial overlay into Cesium OCM Buildings as suggested, but I’m not seeing any change (buildings still comprise white roof and walls). Let me know if you have any ideas as to why this is the case.

Cheers,
Luke

4

Hi @Luke_Mahoney,

Can you double check that you’re using this week’s release? It should show up as v1.8.1 in the Plugins panel in the Editor. If not, you should be able to update through the Epic Marketplace, but you may have to restart it.

If you do have that version, then two things I can think to try: 1) check if you’re using a custom Material (the default one supports raster overlays, but a custom one might not), and 2) check if there are any warnings or errors in the Output Log.

Kevin

1 Like
6

Hi @Luke_Mahoney,

Was looking into a similar thing, found that if you want higher resolution of the Bing Map you can increase the Maximum Texture Size to enhance the overlay, might be useful!

03_HigherResOverlay.PNG
03_HigherResOverlay.PNG1920×1049 259 KB

7

Hi @Kevin_Ring, @tikitakatico,

Success! Kevin you were correct, I had the old version installed. Thanks! The step I think that I was missing was that the plugin needs to be disabled in Unreal prior to installing the update.

Thanks for the tip Tikitakatico. I seem to be getting a low res/blurry overlay (attached) even after cranking up the Max Texture Size. Is there a way to maintain the native Bing map resolution on the overlay?

Thanks again
Luke

Cesium_blurry_houses.PNG
Cesium_blurry_houses.PNG1920×844 152 KB

8

Glad to hear that worked @Luke_Mahoney! You can get more detail in the Bing overlay by setting the overlay’s Maximum Screen Space Error property to a lower value. You may want to keep the max texture size to something reasonable when you change this, though. 4096 or 8192 at most, probably.

Cesium OSM Buildings uses “additive refinement”, which means that big, important buildings are in big tiles covering a large area. Smaller buildings are in smaller child tiles. When we zoom in close enough to show the small buildings, we continue rendering the big tiles with the larger buildings, too. This is different from “replacement refinement” where we switch from the big tiles to the small tiles as we zoom in. Now, because those big tiles are subject to the texture size limit and screen-space error computation, and because they remain visible even when we’re zoomed in close, the overlays draped on large buildings are unfortunately going to be blurrier (when zoomed in) than the textures draped on small buildings in small tiles.

Which is a long way of saying that Bing imagery draped on Cesium OSM Buildings is right now mostly useful for adding a bit of color for viewing buildings from a distance, and it won’t be possible to make the textures perfectly sharp.

Kevin

9

Thanks for the explanation @Kevin_Ring, makes sense. I think it is a great improvement regardless of the resolution.

Cheers,
Luke