By Coulter Heiberger · Updated
Serve your own quantized-mesh terrain, the same format as Cesium World Terrain, from files you keep, no subscription.
Cesium streams terrain from quantized-mesh tiles: a layer.json manifest plus a tree of .terrain files. Cesium ion sells this as a hosted subscription, but nothing about the format requires one. Point CesiumJS or Cesium for Unreal at any HTTP URL serving the same files and the globe streams your terrain. A Mantle Place bundle ships a complete tileset for the area you draw: the Elevation/Terrain folder holds layer.json and the full tile tree, so self-hosting is one static file server away: localhost for a working session, any web host for a team. The terrain lives on your disk with no token and no expiry, and the same bundle carries the imagery, the elevation model, and meshes for the rest of your pipeline.
No. The data is not locked to Cesium. The same bundle carries GeoTIFF elevation and imagery for QGIS, and meshes for Blender and the files the importer turns into an editable Landscape for Unreal, and more, at no extra cost.
Define your area of interest on Earth. The terrain tileset in the bundle covers exactly that extent, at the finest resolution available for the site.
In your vault, download Everything and unzip it anywhere. The Elevation/Terrain folder is the complete tileset: layer.json at its root plus the quantized-mesh tile tree beneath it. (Bundles delivered before the layout refresh carry it as a CesiumTerrain folder; everything else is identical.)
Start any static file server inside the Elevation/Terrain folder (one line of Python runs one on localhost) and confirm layer.json loads in a browser.
In Cesium for Unreal, add the CesiumTerrain actor, not Cesium3DTileset, and set its URL to the served layer.json. In CesiumJS, create the terrain provider from the same URL.
Add a raster overlay pointing at the bundle’s imagery GeoTIFF so the terrain reads photo-real, then fly the camera to your area.
No. Cesium ion is a hosting service, not the format. The tiles in the bundle are standard quantized-mesh, the same wire format Cesium World Terrain uses, so any static HTTP server can stream them to CesiumJS or Cesium for Unreal.
They read different formats. The CesiumTerrain actor consumes quantized-mesh terrain (layer.json plus .terrain tiles), which is what the bundle ships. Cesium3DTileset expects a tileset.json with glTF tiles, a format this bundle does not contain.
Cesium clients request tiles by URL as the camera moves, and stable builds of Cesium for Unreal reject raw file paths. A one-line static server on localhost satisfies that; a regular web host does the same for a whole team.
Yes. The bundle carries the terrain as editable meshes and the GeoTIFF elevation model at no extra cost, so the streamed tileset is one option among several. The Mantle Place Importer route gives you editable Landscape terrain in Unreal from the identical data.
Draw your area, read its Site Brief, and download a bundle you keep: terrain, imagery, CAD drawings, and more, ready for Unreal, Revit, Rhino, and more. $5 plus $2 per square kilometer, and 2 km² and under is free.
Native plugins: Mantle Place for Unreal and Mantle Place for Revit.
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