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?

Answer 1

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:

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

Answer 2

Cesium supports two terrain formats:

1. Quantized-Mesh
2. HeightMap

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

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

Creating 3D terrains with Cesium

Answer 3

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.