Cesium 3D Tiles Output

PIX4Dcloud PIX4Dcloud Feature Request
1

Does anybody have experience with generating cesium 3d tiles of the textured mesh output of pix4d?

(the point cloud can be processed into 3d tiles using cesium.entwine.io, that works fine)

Or can I ask this as a feature request? To have a native 3d tiles output in pix4d?

The specification is here:

https://github.com/AnalyticalGraphicsInc/3d-tiles

 

An example of textured meshes as 3d tiles is made by vricon

https://cesiumjs.org/2016/03/08/Vricon-and-3D-Tiles/

 

This is an interesting blog post about this matter

https://cesiumjs.org/2017/05/19/GERST-engineers/

 

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2

I had not heard about these cesium 3d tiles before. Thanks for sharing the links to the articles and github account. My understanding of these articles, is that this format is meant to facilitate the visualization of 3d models on websites (e.g. faster loading, etc…). 

We recently added new formats for 3d models (3D Textured Mesh) that are meant to improve online visualisation (.osgb, .slpk). 
What would be the advantage of Cesium tiles in comparison to these? I’m trying to better understand how these could be used and what the advantages are. This will enable me to submit a more detailed feature suggestion to our product team. 

Maybe someone else from the Community has had some experience with this format? 

3

I do not have ESRI software, so I cannot test the .slpk.

The OSGB, how can I publish that on my own private website?

Is it possible to convert that to osgjs while keeping the tiles? Or what is the intended OSGB workflow?

Thanks in advance.

4

If you would like to publish the 3D Textured Mesh on your website, we would suggest one of these options instead of the .osgb format: 

The .osgb format could be useful when working with software viewers such as Acute3D Viewer, Skyline TerraBuilder or SuperMap. Note that we have not tested all of these, so we cannot guarantee the compatibility. 

5

Problem is my data is of sensitive nature, so I do not want to upload these to Pix4d Cloud, Sketchfab or any other public cloud.

6

Are you planning to create your own file viewer? or which third party viewer will you use? Is there one for the Cesium tiles? 

If you create your own file viewer, you could build one for the .fbx file format for example. 

7

The viewer I will use is https://cesiumjs.org

An example for Cesium showing a 3d tiled mesh is: https://d3h9zulrmcj1j6.cloudfront.net/Orlando_Cesium/App/index.html

Pix4d can already generate mosaic tiles for on the web,

3_dsm_ortho/2_mosaic/google_tiles/project_name_mosaic.html

If you copy the google_tiles directory to a webserver, you have instantly a mosaic on the web.

I would be nice if Pix4d could also generated 3d tiles and then also generate a 2_densification/3d_mesh/3d_tiles directory with a generated project_name_3dtiles.html based on the open source cesium, so that if you would copy the 3d_tiles directory to a website you instantly have an online web-based 3d mesh that people can view without installing software or plugins and without dependency on cloud stuff like sketchfab.

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8

Thanks for explaining the use case in more detail! That will help us present the purpose of such 3d tiles in more detail to the Product Managers of the software.

9

@Pierangelo Something I think is missing with Pix4D cloud is the ability to upload completed projects that have been processed on the desktop application. What we really need as service providers is a way to share our projects with clients and allow them to annotate and interact with the model.

4DMapper (not Pix4D) is a wonderful web application that does this but requires Cesium tiles to be generated to visualise the 3D model.

10

@Vector Imaging Systems Thanks for your feedback. I agree that uploading the results from the desktop software directly to the cloud to share the results would be a major improvement. I believe we are heading in this direction of having an easy way to share outputs directly in Pix4D rather than with Cesium tiles in third party software. Stay tuned and let us know if you have other feedback. 

11

+1 for Cesium output in Pix4D

This is one of the major reasons ContextCapture is gaining so much ground in the marketplace at the moment. Cesium is becoming the standard platform for cloud viewing of heavy 3D/GIS datasets.

Pix4D is now a less useful processing alternative because it isn’t supporting this move into flexible cloud presentation of the resulting data. Great for outputting to traditional CAD/GIS software, but not cloud viewing.

 

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12

+1 for Cesium export!

As Pix4D already has internally the LOD Tiles data structure, it would be a trivial effort to support one more tiled type of mesh data like 3DTiles.

Agisoft Photoscan has  added 3DTiles exporting recently, together with ContextCapture they make a good competition, hope Pix4D wants to stay in the race :slight_smile:

13

+1 for Cesium 3D tiles!

It will be really great for Pix4D as well to incorporate a user-friendly feature which could encourage model development on pix4d which can easily be rendered on a popular viewer.

This way pix4d will be complimenting a work rather than competing with an open-source strong contender!

 

14

Hello, 

Thank you all for your input! Your feedback has already been forwarded to the Product Management team in order to be considered for future implementation. 

Feel free to share more suggestions regarding the improvement of our product with us.

Regards,

 

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15

+1 for Cesium 3D tiles

 

we need this feature, cesium is powerful 3d webGL engine, most of 3d webGIS software is based on cesium, such as skyline for web and supermap for web

16

+1 for Cesium 3D tiles

I too would find this feature to extremely useful.

17

Hello, please is there any new info about sharing LOD mesh produced by Pix4Dmapper on web?

18

Hi @michal,

LOD mesh (* .osgb) can be produced by Pix4Dmapper and mesh (*.obj) can be displayed on our Cloud.

By right clicking on the textured mesh you can export it:

image

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There no further development regarding this topic.

Best

19

I have a tool that converts any number of OBJs to OGC 3dtiles. Only limit is hard drive capacity.

Check out the demo on this link : GitHub - ebeaufay/threedtiles: 3DTiles viewer for three.js

It’s a link to a threejs viewer but the 3dtiles are standard. There’s contact details in the link if someone’s interested.