CesiumJS 1.55 is Here with Faster Imagery and Terrain

We are happy to announce the release of Cesium 1.55.

As part of this release, we’ve revamped terrain and imagery rendering, resulting in terrain and imagery loading an average of 33% faster (with some scenes loading twice as fast!) and streaming an average of 33% less data.

Mount Olympus, UT, with Cesium World Terrain.

Highlights include:

Updated terrain and imagery rendering, resulting in terrain/imagery loading ~33% faster and using ~33% less data
Added CZML arcType support for polyline and polygon
Fixed an issue where polygons on terrain using rhumb lines where being rendered incorrectly

For the full list of changes, see the change log.

CesiumJS 1.79.1
57 MB | Mar 01, 2021

News

The OGC adopted 3D Tiles as a Community Standard for streaming massive 3D content! This will accelerate the adoption of 3D Tiles and the growth of its supporting ecosystem, including improved data pipelines and visualization optimizations in Cesium.

Cesium World Terrain has added additional 1m resolution in areas across the United States.
Patrick won a Khronie award for his work on glTF.
Cesium was featured in a Trajectory article about the importance of open source in GEOINT.
Geopipe’s is using Cesium and 3D Tiles to stream whole cities of building models.

Development

We’ve improved Cesium ion’s photogrammetry tiling pipeline to produce better placeholders for higher quality, faster streaming.
3D Tiles now supports WebP compression, bringing better compression to 3D Tiles that require massive textures, such as photogrammetry, CAD/BIM, and 3D buildings.
Cesium ion now supports uploading massive glTF models for tiling to 3D Tiles.
We’ve added Draco compression to our tiling pipeline for massive point clouds so that they load even faster in Cesium.