3D Tiles (Cesium)

3D Tiles is an OGC standard for streaming large 3D scenes into a browser. The model is cut in advance into spatial tiles and levels of detail, and the client loads only what falls into the frame. That is exactly how whole cities are shown on the web without making the user wait for the entire scene to load.

You need this export when a 3D city has to live on a web page: a geoportal, a digital twin showcase, a display of the built environment in CesiumJS or deck.gl. A plain OBJ or glTF runs into browser memory on a scene like that, while a tileset is designed precisely for gradual loading.

The output is a ZIP archive with a ready tileset: tileset.json at the root and a tiles folder with .glb files next to it. The area is cut by a grid of roughly 500 meters, and each tile holds the buildings of its cell, extruded from OSM outlines. tileset.json records the geographic bounds of every tile and the detail parameters, so the scene lands in its place on the globe right away.

The archive has to be unpacked and served over HTTP: tiles are loaded by relative paths, so opening tileset.json from a local disk in a browser usually does not work.