Cesium Native

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

• 3D Tiles runtime streaming
• lightweight glTF serialization and deserialization, and
• high-precision 3D geospatial math types and functions, including support for global-scale WGS84 ellipsoids.

Currently Cesium Native is used to develop Cesium for Unreal. In the future, we plan for Cesium Native to be a foundational layer for any 3D geospatial software, especially those that want to stream 3D Tiles.

A high-level architecture of Cesium for Unreal, Cesium Native and Unreal Engine streaming content from Cesium ion.

🗃️Libraries Overview

Library	Description
Cesium3DTiles	Lightweight 3D Tiles classes.
Cesium3DTilesReader	3D Tiles deserialization, including 3D Tiles extension support.
Cesium3DTilesWriter	3D Tiles serialization, including 3D Tiles extension support.
Cesium3DTilesSelection	Runtime streaming, decoding, 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.
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.
CesiumUtility	Utility functions for JSON parsing, URI processing, etc.

📗License

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

💻Developers

⭐Prerequisites

• Visual Studio 2017 (or newer), GCC v7.x+, Clang 10+. Other compilers may work but haven't been tested.
• CMake

🚀Getting Started

Clone the repo

Check out the repo with:

git clone git@github.com:CesiumGS/cesium-native.git --recurse-submodules

If you forget the --recurse-submodules, nothing will work because the git submodules will be missing. You should be able to fix it with:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Compile

You can then build cesium-native on the command-line with CMake:

## Windows compilation using Visual Studio
cmake -B build -S . -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64"
cmake --build build --config Debug
cmake --build build --config Release

## Linux compilation
cmake -B build -S .
cmake --build build

Or, you can easily build it in Visual Studio Code with the CMake Tools extension installed. It should prompt you to generate project files from CMake. On Windows, choose Visual Studio 2017 Release - amd64 as the kit to build. Or choose an appropriate kit for your platform. Then press Ctrl-Shift-P and execute the CMake: Build task or press F7.

Generate Documentation

• Install Doxygen.
• Run: cmake --build build --target cesium-native-docs
• Open build/doc/html/index.html