Open source tools to create quantized-mesh tiles for Cesium?

Question

I'm looking for a tool or toolchain to generate quantized-mesh-1.0 tiles that can be used with Cesium. Possible formats for the terrain source are LAS, ASCII Grid or simple XYZ files.

As a first try, I've used the python library quantized-mesh-tile to encode the tiles. This works quite well, but my problem is to create the TIN for the quantized-mesh tiles. Until now, my approaches didn't work or were far to slow.

Are there any open source tools available to generate a tiled TIN or maybe even quantized-mesh tiles directly?

see http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/121561/generating-a-mesh-from-dtm — julsbreakdown, Sep 28 '16 at 13:44
@julsbreakdown quantized-mesh looks like some custom binary fromat rather that PLY. How to convert directly to quantized-mesh? — mrgloom, Aug 13 '18 at 17:11

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 16 '18 at 10:24

My currently preferred solution is Cesium Terrain Builder Docker. It is an extended version of the Cesium Terrain Builder with support for quantized-mesh-1.0 and can be easily run using Docker.

Processing steps are:

Reproject DEM tiles to EPSG:4326 (recommended), e.g. using gdalwarp
Create a Virtual Dataset (VRT) from the tiles using gdalbuildvrt
Create terrain files as described here using the VRT as input
Optional: Generate layer.json by using the -l flag

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 04 '17 at 12:17

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Cesium supports two terrain formats:

Quantized-Mesh
HeightMap

For (Quantized-Mesh) you can try @juls comment.

But for (HeightMap) you can try this blog post:

Creating 3D terrains with Cesium

answered Jan 04 '17 at 12:17

Ahmed GIS

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 26 '18 at 09:11

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Tin-Terrain will do this. It is a simple open source command line tool that we have just released. It will generate a mesh from DEM files either as TIN or TRN or output tiles with zoom levels in quantised mesh format.

answered Sep 26 '18 at 09:11

morishuz

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Avoid overt self-promotion. The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your product or website, that’s okay. However, you must disclose your affiliation in your answers.. In practice this means any answer that recommends your own product must include something like "Disclosure: I am the [position] of [company] that develops/distributes this software". – PolyGeo Sep 26 '18 at 10:02
Thanks for your reply! Your tool works fine, but with a limited input size. For the whole extent, I had to merge the DEM tiles. The result was a very large heightmap (~60GB), which caused the tool to fail because of insufficient memory (16GB). Could this be solved by passing a GDAL VRT as input? – Karsten D. Nov 16 '18 at 09:55

Open source tools to create quantized-mesh tiles for Cesium?

3 Answers3