3D vector tiles with Cesium

This article contains information about how to work with 3D vector tiles and Cesium.

See how 3D tiles and Celsium can work together.

Terrain modeling

3D terrain data can be represented in several ways. In the field of GIS, raster file images are usually used, and each cell value represents elevation (Digital Elevation Model).

For the purpose of visualisation of elevation model, another format can be used, so called Quantized 3D Mesh - the elevation is represented by either regular, but more commonly irregular triangle web.

Sources of 3D data

For the purpose of visualization of terrain in the web browser, is Cesium one of the popular JavaScript libraries and data services to be used. You can set up your web application for 3D data visualization in several ways:

• Have your own terrain data and convert them to 3D quantized mesh format - then you need a server to a) process the data and b) to serve them

• We at MapTiler do provide 3D tiles hosting service. If you login to your MaptTiler Cloud account, you can find 3D Terrain - Quantized Mesh tiles dataset there - and use it in your applications.

  

• Use data provided by the Cesium service

Having 3D tiles data source is only one part of the problem. The 3D tiles will help you just to draw the elevation, but one also needs to “drape” another data source over the elevation, such as the streets map, outdoor map or the satellite map. That way, you can see nice 3D shaped landscape.

Configuring Cesium map application

Check out the tutorial on How to use Cesium JS. This tutorial shows how to create a map and display it on a web page using MapTiler Cloud data.