Virtual Hiking with Cesium?

Am trying to understand what the limits are for the tool as one project I would love to create (for myself an possibly others) would be to hike one of the trails at Rocky Mountain National Park. Is Cesium going to be useful for that, or because it’s based off aerial and satellite input would it just devolve into a bunch of trees?

So, take it that’s a “no”? Or just no one is sure and I’ll just have to see how it responds if I load a project and give the coordinates for one of the trails (say the Bear Lake trail)?

Hello @NaweG ,

We encourage you to visit the area in Cesium for Unreal and see how it might fit into your goals for this project. For inspiration, here’s a small scene I was able to put together near one of the lakes in Rocky Mountain Nation Park.


You are right that, since the base terrain imagery is created from satellites, it may be slightly blurry compared to the standards of a ground-level game. However, you are free to decorate and fill in as much detail as you would like using Unreal assets on top of the base terrain and base imagery provided by Cesium. For more information on placing objects and creating local scenes within the context of the entire globe, see our placing objects and georeferenced sublevels tutorials.

Thank you for your interest in the Cesium for Unreal plugin!

So I’m gathering that trees, brush and such are up to me to place using other assets? I’ve seen the Stockholm example, and I gather the emphasis is on urban settings for pre-builds rather than wilderness?

Basically while you can give me the terrain, the rest is up to me, right? Just want to make sure I didn’t miss an option that would fill in more of the blanks somewhere :smile:

We’ve seen a couple of people in the CesiumJS community use Cesium to record GPS trails from hikes.

Of course satellite imagery like the global Bing imagery won’t capture the trail beneath the trees, but because you’ll have the elevation and terrain, it’s a nice way to record a hike. One of my favorites is RikiTraki: https://www.rikitraki.com/

Since you can upload photos along the trail, you get an up close ground level view to complement the broader context from satellite data.

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Thanks for the suggestions!