Vadstena Meshes Are Now Available as glTF and Cesium 3D Tiles

By Václav Blažek
November 22, 2018

Vadstena 3D Reality‑capture System now delivers its polygonal meshes in the Khronos Group glTFTM and Cesium 3D Tiles. Vadstena output thus becomes readily available in a number of existing modeling and visualization tools.

Vadstena is a fully automatic, state-of-the-art 3D reality-capture software system, developed by Melown Technologies. From a single set of aerial images, Vadstena produces a geometric 3D model, orthoimagery, DEM and land cover in a single unified, automatic process.

Vadstena glTF asset in Blender

Vadstena glTF asset in Blender

GL Transmission Format, or glTF is an API-neutral runtime asset delivery format developed by the Khronos Group’s 3D Formats Working Group. Thanks to glTF support, polygonal meshes produced by Vadstena may now be used in arbitrary software that natively supports glTF or for which a glTF loader exists.

Cesium 3D Tiles is an open heterogeneous 3D data streaming format created by Analytical Graphics Inc and currently undergoing OGC review process. The prime platform supporting 3D Tiles is CesiumJS, a popular open-source frontend library for 3D globes and maps.

Vadstena polygonal meshes are natively produced in VEF which is essentially a multi-resolution, tiled OBJ with geospatial metadata. Depending on your workflow and needs, VEF may be consequently encoded into ESRI Scene Layer Package, or into a VTS tileset, which is our preferred format for web-based VR applications. With glTF and 3D Tiles, the list of available output formats is further expanded for even greater interoperability.

An example dataset, in a variety of formats created by Vadstena 3D Reality‑capture System, including glTF and Cesium 3D Tiles, is available for download on Vadstena product page. More glTF and 3D Tiles based visualizations are shown below.

Vadstena as 3D Tiles in Cesium JS

Vadstena output polygonal mesh in a ThreeJS-based JavaScript glTF viewer (live link)

Vadstena as 3D Tiles in Cesium JS

Vadstena output polygonal mesh in Cesium JS browser (live link)

Václav Blažek, Technical Lead

Václav is a prolific engineer, experienced data architect and the most significant single contributor to Melowntech's codebase. He authored large parts of Vadstena 3D reality-capture system and took the credit of much of its performance and scalability. Václav also authored the streaming servers which form the backend of VTS 3D geospatial software stack.