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Cesium OSM Buildings in STK

  • Jul 21, 2020
  • Blog Post

Earlier this year, Cesium announced Cesium OSM Buildings, a new 3D buildings layer covering the entire world. Cesium OSM Buildings is derived from OpenStreetMap and contains over 350 million buildings. In Systems Tool Kit (STK) 12.0.1 we added support to ingest this building layer and include it in analysis with the new 3D Tile Mask access constraint.

To get started, you will first need to create a free Cesium ion account and install STK 12.0.1 (or a newer version). Once you have these prerequisites, you can add the data to your Cesium ion account and generate an access token for STK. You can find complete instructions for linking STK to your free Cesium ion account here.

Visualizing this data is one facet of what Cesium and STK offer; high fidelity analysis is another. With STK 12.0.1 and all subsequent versions, you can use 3D tiles as access constraints, which enables you to use these buildings to constrain the times when objects can “see” each other.

These times can then be used to constrain the times when platforms are able to communicate. In the video below you will see an aircraft flying through False Creek and then over the city of Vancouver, BC. During this flight you will see when the aircraft can access the facility on the hill, through the buildings.

Cesium OSM Buildings provides a high-resolution data layer for urban contexts and increases the fidelity of your analysis. Please try this out and let us know what you think!