OL3-Cesium

OpenLayers - Cesium integration library. Create your map using OpenLayers 3, and visualize it on a globe with Cesium.

Features

Switch smoothly between 2D and 3D and synchronize:

• Map context (bounding box and zoom level);
• Raster data sources;
• Vector data sources in 2D and 3D;
• Map selection (selected items).

Stay tuned for more exciting features like animated transitions between map and globe view, and synchronization of maps in projections other than EPSG:4326 and EPSG:3857.

Getting started

To obtain OL3-Cesium, either download a release from https://github.com/openlayers/ol3-cesium/releases, or clone the repository and build it yourself (see below).

Applications using this OL3-Cesium distribution also need to load OpenLayers and Cesium resources (all included in the distribution):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="ol3/css/ol.css" type="text/css">
<script src="ol3/ol.js"></script>
<script src="Cesium/Cesium.js"></script>
<script src="ol3cesium.js"></script>

An OpenLayers map can be switched to a 3d globe view by running the code below after the map has been created:

var ol3d = new olcs.OLCesium({map: map}); // map is the ol.Map instance
ol3d.setEnabled(true);

The above will use the WGS84 ellipsoid all around the globe. To use terrain, simply add a terrain provider using the Cesium API (can be your own, but in the snippet below it's one that ships with Cesium):

var ol3d = new olcs.OLCesium({map: map}); // map is the ol.Map instance
var scene = ol3d.getCesiumScene();
var terrainProvider = new Cesium.CesiumTerrainProvider({
  url: '//cesiumjs.org/stk-terrain/tilesets/world/tiles'
});
scene.terrainProvider = terrainProvider;
ol3d.setEnabled(true);

Building the library

Requirements for building OL3-Cesium:

• GNU Make
• Node.js
• Python
• Ant

To get started, clone the OL3-Cesium repository with its submodules:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/openlayers/ol3-cesium.git

Change into the clone directory, and invoke

$ make dist

from the root of the repository. You will then be able to use dist/ol3cesium.js for your applications.

Running the examples in debug mode

This is useful for contributing to OL3-Cesium, because it loads the source files instead of a minified build:

$ make serve

will make the distribution examples available at http://localhost:3000/