Preload tileset area?

Cesium for Unity
1

The final output of my scene will be a video. There’s one part of the video that will zoom down to a location close to the ground, however that part of the terrain takes too long to load, about a second or so. I’m looking for potential solutions.

  • I see that downloading parts of Google’s 3d tiles aren’t allowed.
  • If there was a way to have it track an additional camera besides the active one, that might work. I don’t know if this is possible
  • Also, if there was a way to have it load up to the needed lod level each frame in disregard for the effect on frame rate, that would work as well, since it’s a video. I know there’s a “forbid holes” setting, but that’s not the same.
  • I’m going to experiment with adding a freeze frame that I can cut out in post that might give the tiles time to load. The tricky part with that is that I’ll have to pause various other parts of the simulation at the same time, and I’m not sure how that’s going to work with complex camera movements.
  • The only other thing I can think of is to use other means to generate that part of the terrain, but that will not look as good and kind of negates the whole reason for using the photo-realistic tiles.

Any other ideas?

2

Hi @adsilcott, welcome to the community!

If there was a way to have it track an additional camera besides the active one, that might work. I don’t know if this is possible

This is a feature that’s on our radar, and we have a Github issue for it here. There is also a community PR open that may address this issue here, but it’s experiencing a few delays.

Also, if there was a way to have it load up to the needed lod level each frame in disregard for the effect on frame rate, that would work as well, since it’s a video. I know there’s a “forbid holes” setting, but that’s not the same.

There are preload settings, e.g., Preload Ancestors, but currently no way to actually preload all of the necessary tiles for a camera path. :frowning:

I’m going to experiment with adding a freeze frame that I can cut out in post that might give the tiles time to load. The tricky part with that is that I’ll have to pause various other parts of the simulation at the same time, and I’m not sure how that’s going to work with complex camera movements.

I think this may be your best solution. In the past I created a video with Cesium for Unity for the Photorealistic 3D Tiles launch, and I simply looped the flight path until I was sure all of the tiles were loaded, and then recorded. I had a bird flying in Yosemite National Park, and I just looped the animation of the bird accordingly.

If you do this loop, it will also help to increase the Maximum Cached Bytes property on your tileset, so that more of the data remains cached.

Let us know if you have any other questions!

3

Thanks for the thorough reply! I’m glad to hear there’s a potential solutions in the works, in the mean time I’ll go with my #4 approach.

I wanted to mention that I’ve really enjoyed my time using this tool. I’ve used just about every GIS tool there is for Unity at one point or another and Cesium is by far the best.