Tutorial by B.Fanini (CNR ISPC)
Cesium ion is an open platform for tiling, hosting and serving large geospatial datasets: it allows to upload your content (e.g. large meshes or point-clouds) and optimize it as 3D Tiles OGC standard (see here for more details) . It also offers the possibility to download the processed dataset, for other online 3D viewers or offline use.
Using this service to process and convert your large datasets into 3D tiles for ATON is pretty simple.
First off you need to login on Cesium ion: you can use your Epic Games account, GitHub, SketchFab or Google to sign in. Once logged in, go to “My Assets” and “Add data“:
Then add all files required: for instance a large OBJ model (e.g. from photogrammetry) including MTL and local textures (any resolution):
Very important to select “3D Capture / Reality Model / Photogrammetry“, then select “Make available for download” and leave the rest as shown in the above figure.
Go for upload, then Cesium ion will start to process it. You can go grab a coffee or keep on with your work since it will be processed on the cloud.
Once the tiling process is completed, you should see an interactive preview. At this point you can download the zip package with your tileset and place it into your models folder and proceed as usual to create a new scene referencing the main tileset root (JSON).
For point-clouds, the workflow is identical, just upload las or laz as input files and launch the tiling process. For more information on supported files, have a look here
You can also keep the dataset hosted on Cesium ion and reference it in your ATON scene (it will require a valid token).