Underground, TypeScript, and Global 3D Buildings in CesiumJS 1.70

[omar]

CesiumJS 1.70 is now out: https://github.com/CesiumGS/cesium/releases/download/1.70/Cesium-1.70.zip

Full changelog.

This release comes with 3 major announcements. Let us know what you think or if you have any questions in this thread!

Cesium OSM Buildings

Cesium OSM Buildings is a 3D buildings layer covering the entire world built with OpenStreetMap data. It’s available as a 3D Tileset for all Cesium ion users and comes with rich per-feature data like building name, address, opening hours, and much more.

Cesium OSM Buildings on top of world terrain, Denver, CO.

Read more about this new global layer and how to use it in your applications.

Underground Support

We now have better support for visualizing underground scenes, from large geological layers underneath the Earth to mines, caves, and utilities. CesiumJS 1.70 adds the ability to make the globe transparent to visualize the data underneath, and allow the camera to freely go underground.

Visualizing Earth’s core in CesiumJS 1.70.

These Sandcastle examples show you how to use the new globe transparency features:

• How to enable globe transparency
• Enable transparency only on a section of the ground
• Customize what’s visible underground

TypeScript

CesiumJS now ships with official TypeScript type definitions! The most up-to-date and correct definition files will now ship with each new release, and TypeScript support will be officially tracked as part of the CesiumJS GitHub repository.

Read more about how this works and what all went into this effort with Matt’s deep architectural dive.

[Aristeidis_Bampakos]

@omar official Typescript definitions rock ! I have noticed many people have started contributing to the project after this announcement with fixes around documentation and Typescript. This type of engagement is very good for the community

[omar]

Absolutely! Even though I don’t use TypeScript in my day-to-day it’s very cool seeing this effort expose all these documentation issues and get all these contributions from different folks. And big thanks to @Matt_Amato for coordinating a lot of this effort!

[Matt_Amato]

Thanks, everyone!

On that note, I’m excited to announce the release of CesiumJS 1.70.1, a patch release that mainly incorporates the feedback and pull requests we’ve received from our Typescript community. Get it from npm or our downloads page: https://cesium.com/downloads/

[plaulhe]

I would like to express my congratulations for the remarkable work presented by @omar . I am currently in a similar situation where I aim to reproduce what he has achieved, but with pipelines instead of caves. I have replicated all the steps presented, except for one crucial detail: the rendering of my .obj objects. My pipelines are provided in .obj format, and although the quality is good in an online viewer, it seems to be compromised during the conversion to 3D Tiles in Cesium. The texture only appears when close to the object, and its quality is very low. Therefore, I wonder if the .obj format is the most suitable for use in Cesium. How can I improve the rendering quality in the viewer? I’m sure discussions on this topic have already taken place, but unfortunately, I can’t find any similar to my issue. thanks a lot for your help