Terrain Tilesets

STK Terrain Server combines one or more data sources together in a user-defined order and processes them to create a tileset that is ready for fast, accurate 3D visualization.

A tileset is a multi-resolution pyramid of tiles. At the tip of the pyramid, or root, just two tiles represent the terrain for the entire world. Each of those tiles has four child tiles that together cover the same area as the parent, but do so with greater accuracy. This pattern continues to an arbitrary depth, and that depth need not be constant over the entire world. For example, a tileset may include very high resolution terrain, 20 levels deep, for a small area, while only including the first four levels for the rest of the world. Each tile in the tileset is a Delaunay triangle mesh, also known as a triangulated irregular network (TIN).

Creating a terrain tileset with STK Terrain Server is easy. Simply select the data source layers to include and their order relative to each other. STK Terrain Server will automatically determine the appropriate depth of tiles to generate and generate the tiles in the background. The tile generation process can take somewhere between minutes and days depending on the size of the data sources incorporated into the tileset.