Cesium Native

📚Documentation - 📒Change Log - 💬Community Forums

📖About

Cesium Native is a set of C++ libraries for 3D geospatial, including:

• 3D Tiles runtime streaming
• lightweight glTF serialization and deserialization
• high-precision 3D geospatial math types and functions, including support for global-scale WGS84 ellipsoids.
• support for draping raster overlays from WMS, TMS, WMTS, and other sources over 3D tilesets

Cesium Native powers Cesium's runtime integrations for Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, Cesium for Omniverse, and Cesium for O3DE. Cesium Native is the foundational layer for any 3D geospatial software, especially those that want to stream 3D Tiles. See Projects Using Cesium Native for a list of projects currently integrating with Cesium Native.

A high-level Cesium platform architecture with the runtime integrations powered by Cesium Native and streaming content from Cesium ion.

📷Screenshots

The Googleplex in Mountain View, California, USA, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Cesium for Unity.	Cesium OSM Buildings in Cesium for Unreal with shading from metadata on building height and age.
The Copernicus Crater, visualized with Cesium Moon Terrain in Cesium for Unreal.	Cesium for Omniverse scene set in San Francisco, California, USA. Data courtesy Aerometrex.

🗃️Libraries Overview

Library	Description
Cesium3DTiles	Lightweight 3D Tiles classes.
Cesium3DTilesContent	Classes that support loading and converting 3D Tiles tile content.
Cesium3DTilesReader	3D Tiles deserialization, including 3D Tiles extension support.
Cesium3DTilesWriter	3D Tiles serialization, including 3D Tiles extension support.
Cesium3DTilesSelection	Runtime streaming, level of detail selection, culling, cache management, and decoding of 3D Tiles.
CesiumAsync	Classes for multi-threaded asynchronous tasks.
CesiumGeometry	Common 3D geometry classes; and bounds testing, intersection testing, and spatial indexing algorithms.
CesiumGeospatial	3D geospatial math types and functions for ellipsoids, transforms, projections.
CesiumGltf	Lightweight glTF processing and optimization functions.
CesiumGltfContent	Classes that support manipulating the content of a glTF.
CesiumGltfReader	glTF deserialization / decoding, including glTF extension support (KHR_draco_mesh_compression etc).
CesiumGltfWriter	glTF serialization / encoding, including glTF extension support.
CesiumIonClient	Functions to access Cesium ion accounts and 3D tilesets using ion's REST API.
CesiumJsonReader	Reads JSON from a buffer into statically-typed classes.
CesiumJsonWriter	Writes JSON from statically-typed classes into a buffer.
CesiumQuantizedMeshTerrain	Classes for accessing terrain in the quantized-mesh-1.0 format.
CesiumRasterOverlays	Classes for raster overlays, which allow draping massive 2D textures over a model.
CesiumUtility	Utility functions for JSON parsing, URI processing, credits, etc.

📗License

Apache 2.0. Cesium Native is free for both commercial and non-commercial use.

🔧Projects Using Cesium Native

The following official Cesium integrations are built on top of Cesium Native:

• Cesium for Unreal
• Cesium for Unity
• Cesium for Omniverse
• Cesium for O3DE

In addition, Cesium Native has been used by the community to build projects including:

• vsgCs integrates Cesium Native with VulkanSceneGraph.
• osgEarth uses Cesium Native to load 3D Tiles in OpenSceneGraph.

If you have a project that integrates with Cesium Native that isn't on this list yet, please let us know!

💻Developing with Cesium Native

See the Developer Setup Guide to learn how to set up a development environment with Cesium Native and begin developing with it.

⭐Contributing

Are you interested in contributing to Cesium Native's development? Contributions can come in many forms, from answering questions to creating issues and pull requests. See our Contribution Guide to find out how to get started!