GLTF file not well positioned by Cesium

Question

I want to display a hurricane (big isosurface object) in Cesium. For this I converted an OBJ file with longitude, latitude, altitude columns for each vertex of the isosurface representing the hurricane, in a new OBJ file reprojected in ECEF (Earth Centered) projection.

So the final OBJ file contains now X,Y,Z for each vertex instead of longitude, latitude, altitude. After final reformat by obj2gltf, I try to display the GLTF "hurricane" file in Cesium.JS using the code below:

console.log('loading hurricane.gltf';
var mymodel = viewer.scene.primitives.add(Cesium.Model.fromGltf({
                         url : 'data/hurricane.gltf',
                         modelMatrix : Cesium.Matrix4.IDENTITY,
                         asynchronous: false
                   }));

I can see my hurricane on the earth, but not at the good position. I suspect a problem of matrix. IDENTITY matrix seems not to be the good one. I could try to make a new matrix but I can't find enough informations about the axes orientation used by Cesium.
I verified the X,Y,Z ECEF coordinates, they are good. Does anyone already meet this problem ?

emackey emackey · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-13T17:22:28

If your glTF model origin is at the center of the hurricane, you can place it using a Cesium Entity, something like this:

// Longitude degrees, Latitude degrees, height in meters
var position = Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegrees(-123.0744619, 44.0503706, height);
var heading = Cesium.Math.toRadians(0);
var pitch = 0;
var roll = 0;
var hpr = new Cesium.HeadingPitchRoll(heading, pitch, roll);
var orientation = Cesium.Transforms.headingPitchRollQuaternion(position, hpr);

var entity = viewer.entities.add({
    name : 'Hurricane',
    position : position,
    orientation : orientation,
    model : {
        uri : 'data/hurricane.gltf'
    }
});
viewer.trackedEntity = entity;

There are more complete working demos of this on Sandcastle.

But, if your hurricane is visible on the surface of the Earth using the identity matrix, that likely means that the origin of that model is nowhere near the center of the hurricane. You may need to edit the glTF file, to make sure that the model is centered on its own origin, and does not have some fixed Earth location pre-baked into the model's internal transformations.

GLTF file not well positioned by Cesium

1 Answers