Hey Steve,
Cesium supports two terrain formats, one raster based, and one quantized mesh.
Have you seen the docs for both here: http://cesiumjs.org/data-and-assets/terrain/formats/quantized-mesh-1.0.html
http://cesiumjs.org/data-and-assets/terrain/formats/heightmap-1.0.html
?
Indeed it does and indeed, those are the (excellent) documentation pages.
My question was related to the tiling system used by the Cesium terrain service. It appears to be a two-headed quad tree. Or a truncated quad-tree with a missing head and two empty entries at the second level if you want to look at it that way. In any case, it doesn’t correspond to any of the more common tiling schemes out there for imagery.
I suspect the answers to my questions are: Yes. Yes. Maybe. No.
So the one I’m really hoping for now, is: Are there any tiled image sources with a 1:1 correspondence to the Cesium terrain tiles. This would allow us to overlay tile 0/1/0.terrain with 0/1/0.jpg and not do the rescaling/slicing that CesiumJS is apparently doing.
Longer term, I suspect we could run off our own terrain database with the Cesium tools in the Web Mercator TMS quad-tree we need. But short term I just want to get something working so the client can decide how they like Cesium terrain on mobile devices.
-Steve G
(mousebird consulting inc)