3D Tiles Next roadmap

[pjcozzi]

Now that the Cesium 3D Tiles implementation is officially shipping in Cesium 1.35, we would like community input on the big picture for the next version of 3D Tiles:

3D Tiles Next.

A key part of 3D Tiles' success thus far has been the active community participation, thank you! We are striving to increase it for 3D Tiles Next so any and all feedback is welcome!

Our vision includes:

• A truly 3D vector tile for heterogeneous classification that conforms to arbitrary 3D tilesets such as terrain, photogrammetry models, and point clouds. Vector Tiles #228, Vector Tile Roadmap #25, Allow additional vector image storing options #239
• Time-dynamic streaming - basically streaming video meets massive 3D geospatial datasets, except the video is interactive. Time-dynamic 3D Tiles #102
• A 3D analytics-enabled styling language - is a feature in shadow? visible from another feature? what is the distance to another feature? etc. Declarative styling #2
• Fast compression/decompression for geometry and textures. Option/extension for draco point compression #188, Document texture compression #173
• Implicit tiling schemes to better support dynamically generated tilesets, uniform global-scale datasets, and time-dynamic datasets. Implicit tiling schemes #92, Generating tilesets dynamically #90
• An even more engaged community and ecosystem, including Cesium Composer

Please comment with your ideas, feedback, or even just +1's for items of interest.

For more background, see the The Next Generation of 3D Tiles blog post.

[lilleyse]

An ambitious list for sure. It's nice to see vector tiles getting closer, which is really the start for all the analytical styling to come.

Another area that we've discussed previously but is not included here is whether terrain/imagery deserves its own 3D Tiles format, or whether it can be served adequately by b3dm.

[pjcozzi]

Terrain is getting good mileage with b3dm, but we can likely do better with a custom format with terrain-specific compression and less boilerplate. It should become more clear as we see how Draco does.

[pjcozzi]

Topic	Status
Vector Data (*.vctr) Polygons, polylines, and placemarks	⚪ In progress, #124
Terrain v2	⚪ Not started, quantized-mesh is a good starting point; in the meantime, folks are using Batched 3D Model
OpenStreetMap	⚪ Not started Currently folks are using Batched 3D Model
Stars	⚪ Not started

[NatKov]

May I please ask if there is an expected date for 3d vector tiles release?

[lilleyse]

There isn't a release date yet but you can start experimenting with vector tiles now. The Vector Data format is outlined here and Cesium has experimental support, like this Terrain Classification demo.

[tberendes]

I have been looking over the Geometry tile format in the 3d-tiles-next branch, and I would like to start experimenting with it. Is there support in the 1.48 release yet?

[lilleyse]

@tberendes - Yes, Cesium has experimental support for Geometry Tiles. Right now they can only be used to classify other tilesets and are not rendered as solid shapes.

See the Point Cloud Classification demo.

[tberendes]

Thanks for your quick response! Are there plans for independent solid shape rendering? I would like to be able to use a 3d tile format to display solid (with transparency) geometric shapes (cylinders and cubes, and possibly arbitrary shapes). We are trying to render large volumes of 3D radar data and found that using entities provides a better visual than pointcloud, but runs the browser out of memory quickly. We were wondering if Geometry or Vector tiles might be the way to go in the future.

[lilleyse]

We don't have plans for it at the moment but I opened an issue so we can keep track of it: CesiumGS/cesium#6919.

If you're looking to do instanced arbitrary shapes you might also want to check out Instanced3DModels.

[tberendes]

Ok, thanks for the info. I had looked at the Instanced3DModel, but the creation of the models seems daunting, and overkill for what we need. We want to generate our shapes on the fly, and I'm not sure how you would do that using the models.

[ptrgags]

This issue is outdated, the current state of 3D Tiles Next can be found here: https://github.com/CesiumGS/3d-tiles/tree/main/next