An open specification for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets.

3D Tiles v1.0 has entered the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Community Standard process.

Overview

3D Tiles defines a spatial data structure and a set of tile formats designed for streaming and rendering 3D geospatial content such as Photogrammetry, 3D Buildings, BIM/CAD, Instanced Features, and Point Clouds.

Specification

• 3D Tiles Format Specification
• 3D Tiles Extension Registry

Future Work

Additional tile formats are under development, including Vector Data (vctr) [#124] for geospatial features like points, lines, and polygons.

See the full roadmap issue for plans post version 1.0 [#309], as well as issues marked as 3D Tiles Next.

Resources and Related Links

• Introducing 3D Tiles - the motivation for and principles of 3D Tiles. Read this first if you are new to 3D Tiles.
• The Next Generation of 3D Tiles - future plans for 3D Tiles.
• 3D Tiles Q&A
• Cesium implementation
  • Download Cesium 1.35 or later and check out the Sandcastle examples labeled '3D Tiles'.
  • Roadmap.
• Sample data
  • 3d-tiles-samples - sample tilesets for learning how to use 3D Tiles
  • Simple 3D tilesets used in the Cesium unit tests.
• Tools
  • 3d-tiles-tools - upcoming tools for debugging, analyzing, and validating 3D Tiles tilesets.
• Selected Talks
  • Data Fusion with 3D Tiles (pdf) at FOSS4G 2018.
  • CityGML, 3D Tiles and Cesium: A Data Fusion Symphony (pdf) at FOOS4G 2018.
  • 3D Tiles in Action (pdf) at FOSS4G 2017.
  • Point Clouds with 3D Tiles (pdf) at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting (June 2017).
  • The Open Cesium 3D Tiles Specification: Bringing Massive Geospatial 3D Scenes to the Web (pptx, example tilesets) at Web3D 2016. 90-minute technical tutorial.
  • 3D Tiles: Beyond 2D Tiling (pdf, video) at FOSS4G NA 2016.
  • 3D Tiles motivation and ecosystem update (pdf) at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting (March 2016).
  • 3D Tiles intro (pdf) at the Cesium BOF at SIGGRAPH 2015.
• Selected Articles
  • Millimeter Precision Point Clouds with Cesium and 3D Tiles. June 2018
  • OneSky Using Cesium / 3D Tiles For Volumetric Airspace Visualization. April 2018.
  • Draco Compressed Meshes with glTF and 3D Tiles. April 2018.
  • OGC Testbed-13: 3D Tiles and I3S Interoperability and Performance ER. March 2018.
  • Historic Pharsalia Cabin Point Cloud Using Cesium & 3D Tiles. February 2018.
  • Cesium's Participation in OGC Testbed 13. February 2018.
  • Adaptive Subdivision of 3D Tiles. August 2017.
  • Aerometrex and 3D Tiles. July 2017.
  • Duke Using 3D Tiles for Excavation in Vulci. May 2017.
  • GERST Engineers, Agisoft PhotoScan, and 3D Tiles. May 2017.
  • Skipping Levels of Detail. May 2017.
  • Infrastructure Visualisation using 3D Tiles. April 2017.
  • SiteSee Photogrammetry and 3D Tiles. April 2017.
  • Optimizing Spatial Subdivisions in Practice. April 2017.
  • Optimizing Subdivisions in Spatial Data Structures. March 2017.
  • What's new in 3D Tiles? March 2017.
  • Streaming 3D Capture Data using 3D Tiles. March 2017.
  • Visualizing Massive Models using 3D Tiles. February 2017.
  • Bringing City Models to Life with 3D Tiles. September 2016.
  • Using Quantization with 3D Models. August 2016.
• News
  • 3D Tiles thread on the Cesium forum - get the latest 3D Tiles news and ask questions here.

Who's using 3D Tiles?

Cesium ion converters	Cesium
CyberCity3D	virtualcitySYSTEMS
Cityzenith	Fraunhofer
Vricon	Federal Office of Topography swisstopo
Bentley ContextCapture	Bentley MicroStation (in progress)
aero3Dpro	Entwine
GeoRocket 3DPS	OSGJS (in progress)
CSIRO Data61	GameSim Conform
SiteSee (using three.js)	Safe FME
Peaxy	Prototype Point Cloud Converter
VirtualGIS	LOPoCS and py3dtiles
iTowns 2	osm-cesium-3d-tiles
geopipe	3D Digital Territory Lab
Çeşme 3D City Model

Live apps

• NYC by AGI
• 3D Swiss Federal Geoportal with 3 million buildings by Swisstopo and AGI
• Bentley ContextCapture
  • Orlando
  • Marseille
• aero3Dpro
  • Impact Of Coastal Erosion in NightCliff, Darwin, Adelaide
  • Future buildings in Melbourne
• virtualcityMAP by virtualcitySYSTEMS
  • 10.1 million buildings in North Rhine-Westphalia (34.098 km²)
  • Textured buildings
  • Textured buildings + point clouds
  • building solar potential
  • Berlin Atlas of Economy (switch to 3D and zoom in)
• Downtown Miami by CyberCity3D and AGI
• Entwine demos, including ~4.7 billion points in NYC
• AEROmetrex
  • Impact Of Coastal Erosion in NightCliff, Darwin
  • 10cm Melbourne, Australia metro
  • Gold Coast, Australia
  • 10cm Sydney, Australia
  • Philadelphia
  • 10cm Brisbane
• VirtualGIS: 2200 Miles of Pipeline
• UrbISOnline: 230,000 buildings Brussels (article)

Also see the 3D Tiles Showcases video on YouTube.

Data credits

The screenshots in this spec use awesome CyberCity3D buildings and the Bing Maps base layer.

Contributing

3D Tiles is an open specification and contributions including specification fixes, new tile formats, and extensions are encouraged. See our guidelines for contributing in CONTRIBUTING.md.

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Created by the Cesium team and built on glTF.