Data Formats: OGC 3D Tiles

The OGC 3D Tiles protocol is designed for streaming and rendering massive 3D geospatial content such as Photogrammetry, 3D Buildings, BIM/CAD, Instanced Features, and Point Clouds from a server to a client. It defines a hierarchical data structure and a set of tile formats which deliver renderable content.

LuciadRIA supports OGC 3D Tiles of version 1.0 and 1.1. They can contain a payload with:

• Point cloud data
  • The PNTS format.
  • The GLB or Binary Graphics Library Transmission format
  • The glTF or Graphics Library Transmission format
• Mesh data (reality meshes or CAD-like data)
  • The B3DM or Batched 3D Model format.
  • The GLB format
  • The glTF format

The OGC 3D Tiles format describes the structure of a 3D tile hierarchy. It consists of:

• A metadata format that describes the 3D scene. It is encoded as JSON, and is typically named tileset.json. It can link to other tileset.json files or data files. It can also describe the 3D scene implicitly, if the scene is subdivided using a perfect (sparse) quadtree or octree. In that case, it contains much less information in itself. It will link to {level}_{x}_{y}_{z}.subtree files for information about tile and content existence at a certain level. In the case of implicit tiling, the information about the bounding volume and the geometric error can be deduced automatically.
• The data files containing the tiles. Each tile contains a payload. In LuciadRIA, the payload consists of either a point cloud in PNTS or GLB/glTF, or a textured 3D mesh in a B3DM or GLB/glTF format. For the encoding of the mesh data itself, the OGC 3D Tiles specification uses glTF. For more information about glTF, see https://www.khronos.org/gltf/.
  Each tile in a tileset can also contain metadata such as:
  • A bounding volume.
  • The geometric error, which represents the visual error incurred by displaying a parent tile instead of its (more detailed) children.
  • A list of child tiles.

Basics

How-to guides

• new in 2024.0Density painting of point cloud data
• Draping on 3D Tiles
• Visualizing Google 3D Tiles
• Highlighting mesh and point cloud data
• Plugging in properties from external data sources
• Obtaining point cloud properties
• Styling and filtering point cloud data
• Styling mesh data
• Showing transparent colors on meshes or point clouds
• Tuning performance and visual quality of point clouds
• Tuning performance and visual quality of tiled mesh data
• Adjusting your WebGLMap's memory budget

Frequently asked questions

• Converting data to the OGC 3D Tiles format
• Why isn't my data being draped on OGC 3D Tiles?
• Which OGC 3D Tiles versions are supported, and what are the limitations?

Reference guides

• Positioning non-referenced mesh and point cloud data
• Selecting mesh data