We need your feedback! Visual Quality defaults

We’re looking for feedback from the community about updating the default visual quality settings in CesiumJS.

Recently we’ve been making improvements to visual quality overall. As part of this process we want to re-evaluate the default settings across the board to hopefully provide a better experience out of the box. We also want to explore a new API that makes it easier for developers to modify the various visual quality settings in one place. We’re also looking into the potential to have various of presets with a simple “High, medium, low” type setting like many games have.

We want to make sure to include everybody’s input. Please let us know what settings you like to use or commonly change in your own applications. Also share any concerns you have around performance when certain settings are on or off in general. We’s also appreciate if you share some use cases you’ve found that struggle in certain aspects visually.

This thread is targeted at building a better set of defaults so CesiumJS looks as good as it can “out of the box” for a wide range of use cases. Feel free to track the progress of this work in the Github Issue here

Some settings to think about:

  • Resolution
    • Screenspace error
  • Antialiasing
    • MSAA
    • FXAA
  • Lighting & atmosphere
  • HDR
  • Dynamic lighting
  • Shadows
  • Fog
  • Post Processing
    • Ambient occlusion
    • Bloom
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Hi all,

To follow up on this, we wanted to show what we’re working on so far.

The follow has already been released with version 1.121:

  1. Enabled MSAA by default with 4 samples. This improves the appearance ofh 3D geometry with small details, thin lines, and edges. PR #12158

    Before / After

  2. Switched the default tonemapping for models, atmosphere, and globe from ACES to PBR Neutral Tonemap from Khronos. The widens the gamut of possible colors, and provides more consistent color appearances across renderers. In particular, this helped brighten the appearance of many models. PR #12160

    Before / After
    Untitled design (2)

    Before / After
    Untitled design (1)

    Before / After

  3. Fixed several bugs with PBR lighting for more realistic rendering. #12100, #12116, #12118, #12043, #12070, #12063, …

    Before
    2024-08-0714-19-17-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter
    After
    2024-08-0714-10-23-ezgif.com-video-to-gif-converter

  4. Expose the tonemapper and exposure property of PostProcessStageCollection to allow changing the tonemap used when HDR is turned on. This defaults to the PBR Neutral Tonemap from Khronos. #12160

    Sandcastle example

We also have some changes in the pipeline which should release soon, including Dynamic Environment Lighting.

Before - Day

After - Day

After - Sunrise

After - Night

Please let us know your thoughts!

  1. Are we moving in the right direction?
  2. What other improvements do you want to see for your use cases?
3 Likes