Using topography from Cesium as landscape

HI everyone, I want to start off by saying that cesium is amazing and is going to change map making in games from here on out!

Now what I am trying to do is take the topographical data and convert it to the editable landscape tool built into unreal 5, I was trying to just make a landscape plane and modify it to fit the topography but it is going to be grueling, tedious and generally terrible to do that.

Has anyone messed around where they can just convert it directly to landscape and just use that to modify/tweak it to make it useable for a racing game or other?

I want to make a sandbox racing game with real world locations and have very detailed areas that cesium is not able to provide at this time.

Also is there any way to get cesium to use the textures to apply to the buildings? and lots of missing buildings as well.

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Bump anyone have any ideas?

Hi! I have the same problem with converting topographical data to editable landscape. Anybody please help!

I’m just spitballing here, but I think you could apply a custom material to the terrain that maps world Z position to black and white. Then set up a top-down orthographic camera and capture a height map that you could use to generate the landscape.

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Hello!
I’d like to ask that is there any way to fit a landscape into cesium’s terrain surface (beside doing it manually)?
I’ve learned that currently its not possible to change the surface of Cesium world terrain because of how its programmed but is there any way to fit a landscape (with collision or offset or etc) to its surface? I want to use the current world terrain as a sample of where things supposed to go but i really want to make adjustments (add roads, hills + traffic etc) to the terrain.
Thank you in advance and happy new year!
Best Regards
Richard

Hi all,

Editing the terrain surface is definitely something we’d like to enable. We’re currently exploring this, and I’m hoping to have more information later on.

For now, please consider sharing your use cases for this feature here in this thread so that the team can gauge community interest in adding this to the plugin.

Thanks for using Cesium for Unreal!

-Alex

Hello!!
My use case is that I need to be able to create very large sized terrain zones for different levels of different locations…
In other words, I don’t need to have the entire World created, just different pieces of the world with a size that I determine and have each piece of the world chosen in a different scene.

Of course I need to be able to manually edit each piece of the World that Cesium creates, to add roads through splines, or to correct/modify certain parts of the terrain heightmap to my liking.

It would be great to be able to divide the areas created by cesium into different terrain tiles based on their size, so that we can load and unload these terrain tiles at runtime and maintain the resolution of the textures that Celsium creates for us. .

In short, the most important thing is that Cesium could create UE terrains using real world data with its included textures… Something like this Unity tool:
https://youtu.be/wNN8xdfm1_I

Greetings

My use case is Archviz, especially large exterior scenes. I need realistic topography, but also need to be able to paint materials and procedural foliage on the landscape close to the project origin. I currently use DEM heightmaps for my landscapes, add a Cesium dataset on top and hide the part of the tileset where i have the landscape. The small issue is that DEMs are using a projected CRS so the actual globe of cesium and the DEM don’t align perfectly. I also need to adjust the true north/projected north rotation for the two topographies to align better.

It would be great if there was an option to create a draped landscape using the tileset, specifying a desired resolution and possibly even applying a landscape material using the satellite images with the maximum resolution.

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@Kevin_Ring @janine @agallegos - Happy Holidays to the three wise folk of Cesium Unreal :slight_smile:

Can you let me know if this PR: Generate navigation mesh on Cesium3DTileset by Project-PLATEAU-Admin · Pull Request #1044 · CesiumGS/cesium-unreal · GitHub addresses this thread?

I came across the PR in a post from @janine while following the other links above. I read the PR and see @Kevin_Ring commented on it and, of course @agallegos posted on all those threads to say “we’re working on it”

Sorry it’s a bit of a vague question. But, what’s the status of using topography from Cesium as landsape/terrain within UE? I know that I can mask holes into the Cesium content - but can I edit the terrain?

Thanks!

p.s. I’m most interested in tunnels and showing subterranean assets (pipes etc.)

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No I don’t think 1044 addresses this issue at all. It’s been in the product for almost a year now, in any case.

There’s currently no way to edit the topography in UE. It’s something we’d like to do, but it’s far from straightforward and we don’t currently have a time frame for it. In the meantime, the closest you can get is this: create a GeoTIFF covering the area you care about, and containing the terrain heights you want to have in that area. I don’t know an exact workflow for that offhand, but I suspect a GIS tool like QGIS can do this. Then, upload it to Cesium ion as Terrain and choose Cesium World Terrain as the base layer. That will create a composite tileset that has your heights in your area, and heights from Cesium World Terrain everywhere else in the world. You can even upload multiple GeoTIFFs covering multiple areas.