Rendering huge point clouds (10s millions of points)

CesiumJS
1

I need to render huge point clouds, sometimes the raw data is 10s of millions of points.

Does the open source CesiumJS library handle performance optimisations for data of this size? If not, then do any of the paid offerings?

2

Hi @jim1,
Thanks for your post and welcome to the Cesium community.

Regarding your question rendering massive geospatial data, yes I believe you have come to the right place :slight_smile:.

Cesium’s approach to rendering massive data is formatting it as 3D Tiles - an open data standard - and then streaming it to a visualization engine such as CesiumJS as you mentioned (we also have native runtimes which also support visualizing 3D Tiles).

Step 1 is to convert your point cloud data to 3D Tiles by uploading it to Cesium ion -Point Clouds Tiler – Cesium. Cesium ion is free for community plans and that should be plenty to handle your use case. After your point cloud is converted to 3D Tiles, Step 2 is visualizing the tileset in CesiumJS using our sandcastle tool. And you will see instructions in the Cesium ion interface alongside your data for how to do this.

Please let us know if you have further questions and we would be happy to help you along with trying out Cesium ion and CesiumJS.

Best,
Luke

3

Hi @Luke_McKinstry thanks for the quick response.

So if I’ve understood, to convert the raw files to something that the open source CesiumJS can render I’d need Cesium Ion, which for commercial use is a paid for tool?: Pricing Plans – Cesium

It looks like it’s also possible to self host, but this doesn’t make it cheaper / free?

Are there any free alternatives to Cesium Ion that convert the raw files? I’m happy to pay for a tool that saves me time, however it would be good to know if there was an “escape hatch” incase the project grows and the bill gets very large in the future, or if your pricing changes.

4

Hi @jim1 .

Yes, Cesium renders point clouds from 3D Tiles for performance purposes. 3D Tiles are an open data standard https://www.ogc.org/publications/standard/3dtiles/ so there are other engines besides CesiumJS that also render them and other ways to convert raw point cloud data to tiles besides Cesium ion. The SaaS version of Cesium ion as you pointed out has the free community tier, and self-hosted Cesium ion does not have a free tier.

Hope that makes all the options clear and please let us know if you have further questions.
Best,
Luke

5

One interesting question could be what the input file type is when you talk about “raw” files. There certainly are some free tools, but with many variables in terms of the tiling performance and the quality of the resulting tileset. This becomes increasingly important exactly for the case that you described, namely for huge point clouds. If you had a “small” point cloud, for example, some LAS file with 100000 points, then you could just pick the first open source tool that works for you, convert that file into GLB or PNTS, and call it a day. But when this is about a huge point cloud that should still be tiled, streamed, and displayed efficiently, then many years of experience about how to do this properly are accumulated in Cesium ion.