Soonish

[x] glTF schema and spec updates
[ ] When repeating an animation, check for parameter[count -1] === parameter[0].
[x] Embedded shaders, textures, and buffers.
[x] Render in and morph to/from Columbus view. Adjust model scale relative to projection?
[x] Render in and morph to/from 2D.
[x] Remove computeWorldBoundingSphere?
[ ] Consistently name id and name in Cesium API to match glTF spec.
[ ] Add ById versions of functions like getNode?
[ ] How will users know the names of nodes/meshes/materials/parameters? Through the glTF property or easier to navigate properties?
Later

glTF Features

glTF Extensions

Animation

[x] Morphing - #164
[ ] Material animation, including splines with control points of any type.
[ ] Consider skinning with dual quaternions.
[ ] Animation blending, e.g., walk to run cycle. Section 11.6 in Game Engine Architecture
[ ] Bezier spline

Animation Performance

[ ] Only update the joint matrices if the nodes were targeted by an animation that frame, instead of updating the joint matrices for all skinned nodes.
[ ] Don't animation when culled. Will still need the right bounding volume: perhaps we can compute it or the user can provide a maximum radius percentage increase.
[ ] updateNodeHierarchyModelMatrix performance ideas with parent pointers. See @pjcozzi's notes.

Loading Performance

[ ] Fine-grained dependency requests, e.g., compile shader program once required shaders are fetched, not once all shaders are fetched. See functions called from createResources.
[ ] In general, what can be done on a web worker?

Rendering Performance

[ ] Auto instance when multiple nodes have the same mesh. This will require copy-on-write if the material for one instance changes, e.g., because it is no longer an instance.
[ ] Compute tighter bounding sphere than using the bounding box's corner points. Do this as a preprocess in an extra property and fallback to client-side.
[ ] Minimize frustum overlap (SAH-like split) - @bagnell
[ ] Material-aware draw commands, #797 - @bagnell
- Cull entire model with a single bounding volumes?
[ ] Pack uniforms. #649
[ ] Coarse front-to-back sort for early-z.
[x] Investigate DXT-compressing textures in a web worker with Crunch using Emscripten. This could be useful throughout Cesium.
[ ] Optimize 2D with render-to-texture within a given zoom interval for non-animated/skinned models.
[ ] When allowPicking is false, we should still render depth.

Cesium-Specific Features

[ ] Add helpers to ModelNode to, for example, easily change the scale transform and interop with TRS animations.
[ ] Expose glTF animations with higher-level objects than glTF, e.g., cleanly expose time[0] and the duration.
[x] Expose targetable materials. Extend ModelMesh.
[ ] Support models in KML.
[x] Reuse texture and vertex buffers when loading multiple models. Probably separate model and instances.
[ ] Attach points. Need access to node's transform (to root) by name. The transform can change over time due to animation, user interaction, etc.
- Attach vapor trails to the back of a launch vehicle.
- Attach a sensor to the front of a UAV.
[ ] Pointing. Need semantics for sun, other objects, etc. to control direction and up vectors.
- Point satellite solar panels to the sun.
- Point sensor on aircraft to a ground station.
- Point communication dish to satellite.
- Point a quad toward the camera, e.g., foliage, explosion, Rudolph's nose, etc. Need to animate when camera moves, not just when time changes.
- Need to limit degrees of freedom, e.g., one rotation for solar panels and two rotations for communication dish.
[x] Shadows
[ ] Interop with the Cesium material system?
[ ] Ability to change states. #1843

CZML

[ ] Schedule animations via CZML, i.e., CZML for calling model.activeAnimations.add.
[ ] Drive model pointing.
[ ] Embed glTF as a CZML extension? Package together as zip?

Model caching

[ ] Reference counting the animation cache so it is also automatically deleted.
[ ] Ability to invalidate the whole cache or the cache for one url/cache-key
[ ] Avoid potential ping-ponging by delaying actually removing from the cache when the count reaches zero for several frames/seconds. This may also move all the GL delete functions into the render loop, which would be better for requestAnimationFrame timing (however, perhaps not noticeable).
[ ] Zero out the embedded resources in the glTF to save even more memory?

Viewer

Ecosystem

Potential Ideas

[ ] maximumSizeInPixels so the min/max could be the same and used as a billboard
[ ] For performance, render to texture with depth map when pixel size is constant and there are no animation/light changes (billboarding)
Older

b26

General

Animation

[x] Add offset (in seconds) to ModelAnimation to allow starting an animation "in progress?"
[x] Skinning - #100

Animation - Cesium Splines - @bagnell

[x] Change math in splines to use result parameters
[x] Change splines from AOS to SOA to share time array and for less cache pollution
[x] Optimize splines for decreasing time
[x] Spline for piecewise linear interpolation
[x] Spline for quaternion interpolation with SQUAD

Animation Performance

Rendering Performance

Cesium Cleanup

[x] Rename attributeIndices to attributeLocations throughout.
[x] Syncup names in UniformDatatype to WebGL.
[x] Replace enum with constants to avoid conversion: IndexDatatype, TextureWrap, TextureMinificationFilter, TextureMagnificationFilter, and PrimitiveType.

CesiumGS / cesium