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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.
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. |
| 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. |
Apache 2.0. Cesium Native is free for both commercial and non-commercial use.
The following official Cesium integrations are built on top of Cesium Native:
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!
See the Developer Setup Guide to learn how to set up a development environment with Cesium Native and begin developing with it.
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!