Release notes

Realistic water, OpenStreetMap import of any size, texture names of their own, a new tour of the panel, and Camera match at the right height.

Photo Studio draws rivers, lakes and the sea as moving water that mirrors the sky and the shore and glitters in the sun; it is there every time a place loads, in photos and 360 panoramas alike, and every picture it appears in credits OpenStreetMap. Shadows in photos are steadier, the panel stays on Photo Studio while a photo, a 360 panorama or a light series is being shot, Cancel beside the progress bar stops it at any moment, and each 360 panorama is saved under a name of its own. With a license or the trial, a schematic city import from OpenStreetMap has no area limit: a large selection is downloaded in parts of up to 4 km² and joined without seams, the panel estimates the number of parts, the download size, the time and the memory before you press Import, and over 50 km² or an estimated 1 GB of download it asks first; Lite imports up to 4 km² at a time. Cancel import, or Esc, stops a download or a build at any point, and 3ds Max stays usable while a city is built. All OpenStreetMap layers now sit in one OSM group under the ValTerra layer, so one eye hides the whole schematic city; the ground is one clean layer, streets are solid strips, and walls and roofs follow each building's outline. Every atlas sheet now has a name of its own, made of the capture folder's name and a six-character code, so a scene sent to a colleague or gathered with the Resource Collector keeps each capture on its own textures; for scenes made with earlier versions, Make texture names unique, under Fix materials in scene, copies the sheets under new names and points the scene at the copies, and the original files stay as they are. The layer of the photorealistic model is now called PHOTOREAL MODEL. A new first-run tour gives a short overview of Import model, Photo studio and Camera match over the real controls, and the light bulb starts it again at any time; the menu button beside the globe's search keeps named places and brings them back; the License section at the foot of the Info tab shows your license and holds Deactivate this machine; and the ValTerra button, with its icon, is added to the main toolbar. Camera match stands the camera at the right height even when a drone writes a wrong absolute altitude into its photos, using the drone's height above take-off over the ground under the photo and saying so in the camera's note; it also works when the drone stood outside the imported area and while 3ds Max is minimized, leaves the scene's environment map as it was, and knows the DJI Mavic 4 Pro.

The schematic city is now as detailed as the map allows: courtyards, roofs on any outline, surfaces, tracks, trees, street furniture, and every named thing as a named object.

The schematic city from OpenStreetMap now reads everything the map holds. Buildings come with their parts, including a part that starts above an arcade, with courtyards as real openings, with twelve roof shapes on any outline, an L, a U, a curved block or a palace around a court, and with colours from the map's own colour and material tags. The ground arrives as parks, water, grass, forest, scrub, sand, residential and industrial land, car parks, squares and pavements, coloured by the surface the map gives them. Streets are splines at their real width, joined by pavements, paths, steps, cycleways, tram and railway track as two rails, bridge decks and watercourses. Trees and whole avenues, walls, fences and hedges, lamps, benches, fountains, monuments, masts, chimneys, towers and the wires between power pylons come in as well. Anything the map names arrives as an object of that name with its tags attached, address, operator, heritage number and date, so the scene can be searched. Geometry is polygons rather than triangles, smoothed only where the surface is really curved. Whatever the map does not know is stated in the status line after the import: each assumption by name, and how many objects needed it. The Activate button no longer clips its label.

Pictures that remember where they were taken, a city that arrives about twice as fast, and an update that no longer needs a restart.

Every picture and 360 panorama from Photo studio now records where it was taken inside the file, beside the Google credit: the point, the ground under it, the height above that ground, the direction, the lens and the moment, with the standard place fields so ordinary photo tools put it on a map. Nothing about the person or the machine goes in. A picture taken before any city was imported can stand a camera later, attached to the anchor, so a city turned or moved afterwards is followed; a 360 panorama is a picture, not a camera, and the plugin says so. Camera match now carries more than one guess from its coarse pass to its finer one, so a photograph whose right answer came second is no longer refused. A city arrives about twice as fast: measured on the same 360 from an empty cache, 55 tiles a second became 99. An update takes effect on the next press of the toolbar button, without restarting 3ds Max. The panel wears the product's own colours, sits on the host's own background, and gains a fourth tab, Info, with the site, what's new, contact and privacy.

The sun turns with the city, 4K and 8K 360s finish, and textures come in on every 3ds Max.

4K and 8K 360 panoramas now finish: each of the six views starts the globe afresh, where before it ran out of memory partway through. Photos, 360s and light series show a progress bar with Cancel, and a file appears in the photos folder only once it is complete; a Photo at 8K in 16:9 is saved at its full 7684 x 4320. The ValTerra sun turns with a turned city, whether the city was turned before or after the sun was made; for a sun made with an earlier version, press Create ValTerra Sun once more. Textures and 360s come in on a 3ds Max whose Qt cannot read JPEG, where the model used to arrive grey, and if textures still cannot be read the status line says how many. Deleting an imported model from the scene offers to move its files to the Recycle Bin, with keeping them as the default. A drone photo left behind a viewport in a saved scene is recognised when the scene opens again and follows its camera as before. Pressing the ValTerra button brings the open panel back as it was, and after an update the panel says so and links what's new.

Drone cameras that line themselves up with the photo, re-import where you deleted, merged scenes that place themselves, and a simpler first run.

Each imported drone photo is now matched against the imported model in the scene and its camera is stood where the photograph says: on by default, about fifteen seconds a photo, with a progress bar and Cancel. Measured against 21 photographs with surveyed poses, the heading lands a median 0.10 degree out and the height a median 0.12 m. A photograph the model cannot be found in keeps its metadata pose, and one Ctrl+Z puts any camera back where its metadata had it. Pixel-perfect refine now opens a drone photo of any resolution. Delete an imported model or some of its cells and that area can be imported again with a clean seam: 'Trim to selection' and 'Leave out areas already in the scene' are now two separate options. Cameras and models brought into a colleague's scene with File > Merge place themselves at their geographic position in that scene, one undo step; 'Place merged objects in this scene' does the same for scenes merged earlier. Drones that record altitude above sea level now land at the right height against the imported model, using the public-domain EGM96 geoid from the NGA; terrain and OpenStreetMap sit on the same datum, and photos taken more than 50 km from the scene are named in the status line. In the viewport, texture atlases default to 4096 px and shading is smooth across texture seams; the guide has a new section, 'Viewing the model in 3ds Max'. Error messages are now plain words with a code, with the details in the MAXScript Listener. Select area now works the way most people reach for it: press and drag across the area; clicking two opposite corners still works. During the trial the license field folds into a single link, 'Enter a license key', so the panel no longer looks as if it is asking for one, and while Import is grey the reason sits right under it. Each entry of the Detail list now gives its own level of detail. Atlas sheets leave out the parts of each texture that no triangle uses: about 17% less texture memory on a Miami test area, with the same pixels wherever the model looks. Photo behind viewport is now a switch: while it is on, a viewport looking through a drone camera shows that camera's own photograph behind it, in the photo's own colours, and the render frame takes the photo's pixel size; look through another drone camera and its photo follows, any other view keeps its usual background, and the render environment is left alone. Photo behind viewport, Pixel-perfect refine and Put the metadata pose back work on a selected drone camera, or on the one the viewport looks through. Every camera ValTerra makes, from drone photos and from Photo studio, goes on its own CAMERAS layer inside the ValTerra layer.

Compiled code, a lighter touch on OpenStreetMap, and fixes for 3ds Max 2025.

The plugin's own code now ships compiled, in a separate set for each Python that Autodesk 3ds Max uses. OpenStreetMap is asked more politely: one Overpass server, a User-Agent that names the plugin and links to the contact page, a pause when the server asks for one, a seven-day cache so a repeat of the same area costs nothing, and a cap of 4 km² per schematic request in every tier. The street map in the panel now goes through the plugin with the same identity and cache, and carries the OpenStreetMap credit. Two 3ds Max 2025 complaints are fixed: the globe drawn in a small rectangle when 3ds Max 2024 is not installed, and sun-panel fields pushed to the right, with old scenes repaired on opening. The installer window no longer hides behind 3ds Max, and captures name the map data without a 'Data attribution' label.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2027 is supported, the package is a quarter of its former size, and the city import is quieter on the network.

ValTerra installs and runs on Autodesk 3ds Max 2027: the panel, the globe, Photo Studio, the sun and the import were all checked on it. The package shrank from 2,746 files to 625, and the installer puts on a machine only the parts its own versions of 3ds Max need, about 250 files for one version; a version of 3ds Max added later needs the installer run once from inside it. The import fetches tiles over a few kept-alive connections instead of opening a new one per file, 32 instead of about 1,600 on a city block, so the network part is faster and the model is unchanged byte for byte. Place the sun by hand now aims the light at the compass, the ray follows the sun you hold and the drift from the true sun updates as you drag; picking a part from the list opens its settings, and the viewport always selects the sun as one object. Materials now ask the viewport to show their maps, so a model no longer comes in grey under a 3ds Max preference that hid them. The user guide gains a Removing it section.

Automatic follows the renderer, and takes nothing with it.

Change the active renderer and a ValTerra Sun left on Automatic follows it: the light becomes the class that renderer wants, and under Corona the sky is built and bound to it. There is nothing to press. What you set on the light yourself is carried across the change — its exclusion list, shadows, colour, layer and object properties — and your selection and the command panel are left exactly as they were. A class you picked by hand is never revised, and an environment map that is not ours is never replaced.

The ValTerra Sun becomes part of a license, and the rig files itself away.

From this version the ValTerra Sun is built under a trial or a paid license, and free Lite builds the Daylight system of Autodesk 3ds Max in its place. A sun already in a scene keeps working in every tier, and the button that puts one back in order is never licensed. The rig also stops landing among your own objects: it files itself on the plugin's own layer, and one made by an earlier version moves there the first time you press that button. The panel now says, where it can be read, that the sun and the compass are one assembly, and how to open it when you want the light's own settings.

ValTerra now builds its own sun and moon, right for the place and the hour and still editable by hand.

A Create ValTerra Sun button in Photo Studio builds sun and compass as one object, with a moon when Moon is ticked, and clicking any part of it opens the same rollouts — latitude, longitude, north, date and time all editable and keyable. The clock holds the true UTC offset for that place on that date, quarter-hour zones included, and the moon is placed for your eye on the ground rather than the centre of the Earth, so its phase and the tilt of the lit edge are the ones you would see. A new sun arrives with its own day already saved — sunrise, both golden hours, solar noon, sunset and the blue hour — and it sizes itself to the scene it is built in. The Volumetric slider in Photo Studio now travels into the render; the sky, the moon, the clouds and the stars are Corona's, so without Corona those parts stay quiet, and the Daylight button is still there. One thing worth knowing: this sun is a ValTerra object, so a scene holding one needs ValTerra to open it — Freeze for handover turns it into ordinary keyframes for a render farm, or for a colleague whose Max has never had ValTerra.

Maintenance release.

Housekeeping in how ValTerra is packaged. The build that produces the installer now applies a stricter check to the finished package before it will ship it. Nothing changes in the panel, in what you can import, or in the key or token you entered — it stays exactly where it was.

Before the first import on your own credential, ValTerra says what it is about to do and on whose account.

The first time an import goes out on your own credential, ValTerra opens a single page before any tile is requested: what it is about to ask for, that the request leaves your own computer on the credential you entered — the provider's account, the provider's terms, the provider's billing — and that what you may do with the result is governed by your own agreement with that provider, not by us. The provider's documents are linked in full, so you read them at the source; the page is worded for the credential you actually hold, since a Google Maps Platform key and a Cesium ion token are agreements with different companies. Cancel is the default button, and it starts nothing. The page returns when the credential kind changes or when the text itself changes, and not merely because ValTerra was updated.

An import no longer leaves its working file on your disk.

An import hands its geometry to Max through a working file, and until now that file stayed there for good. On a machine with a few dozen imports behind it, those files were most of the space ValTerra had ever taken, and none of them opens in anything you work with. The file goes as soon as the objects are in your scene, while the textures and the small record of where the import came from stay where they were. An import that fails keeps everything, so you can try again without fetching the area a second time.

Maintenance release.

Housekeeping inside the package ValTerra ships. Nothing changes in the interface, in what you can import, or in how the globe works: it draws with the key or token you saved in the panel, exactly as it did before.

The panel shows you around the first time you open it.

On a first run ValTerra dims the panel and rings one control at a time, in the order a first import happens: where the key goes, Select area and the two corners that draw a rectangle on the globe, what the panel reads back about that rectangle, what to import and at what detail, then across to Photo studio for the cameras. Steps that do not apply are skipped rather than shown empty, so the license box drops out of the walk once a license is active. A light bulb beside the version line starts the walk again whenever you want it, which matters more than the first run for a tab you have not opened in weeks.

You can tell which machine is which before you release a seat.

When you activate and every seat on your license is taken, ValTerra names the machines holding them and offers Release and activate here. Those activation times now read in your own local time: a stamp from the other side of midnight could make a workstation you activated minutes ago look like somebody else's. Where only a date is on record, it is shown as it came rather than shifted by a guess.

A license you moved is no longer reported as revoked.

Activate on a second workstation and the first one now explains what happened plainly: the license is not active on this computer, and pasting the key back into the panel and pressing Activate moves it back. It used to report the license as revoked, in red, with an address to write to. That address is still in the message, for anyone this really is news to.

A key entered in an older version now activates this computer.

If your key went in before ValTerra registered machines, the panel now says so and puts an Activate this computer button beside your license. One press registers this workstation exactly the way a fresh key is registered, and nothing is sent until you press it. Your license keeps working in the meantime.

Your key now activates this machine, and moving a seat takes a click.

Paste the key from your email and press Activate: this computer registers with us once, and your key is checked here from then on, with nothing to sign in to. A seat covers one machine at a time, so when every seat is taken the panel lists the machines holding them with their activation dates, and Release and activate here gives one to the computer in front of you; the released machine drops to the free Lite tier at its next update check. The Deactivate this machine link from 0.4.91 now frees the seat on our side before deleting the key here, so a dropped call cannot strand a seat on a machine that no longer holds it. The window names what will be sent before you type — the key, a fingerprint of this machine, and the name it is listed under, which is yours to edit.

The panel opens where the work starts, and Select area stands out.

Import model now sits first, under a clearer name: it is what most people open the panel for. Select area is a filled green button that pulses gently until an area exists — in a row of grey buttons it read as one more Clear, and people were not finding it. Search now takes a pin pasted from a map, in decimal or in degrees, minutes and seconds, not only a typed place name, and flying somewhere puts it in the middle of the view instead of under the camera and out of frame. When Windows is blocking 3ds Max from reaching the internet, that message now carries a Copy the fix command button, which puts the one command that clears it on your clipboard, for you to run in PowerShell yourself.

Import options stay readable in a short 3ds Max window.

On a low window the tab where you pick an area and bring in a model used to squeeze its rows until the labels were sliced in half: it was the one tab with no scrollbar, so it had nowhere to put the shortfall. It scrolls now, the way Photo studio and Camera match always have, and the panel can be dragged to about a third of the height it used to demand. The status line at the foot of the globe also carried a stray character where a dash belongs, and reads properly again.

Updating can no longer drop you to Lite without warning.

If your year of updates has ended, the update bar now says so before you install — the newer build would run as Lite — and offers Keep current beside it. The panel now prints the date your update year runs to, so it is not something to keep in your head. Updates now come from this site, and downloading one shows its progress instead of freezing the panel, with no half-finished file left behind when it fails. A license can also be withdrawn if it has to be: the plugin reads a published list of withdrawn keys on the trip it already makes for updates, and sends nothing about you or your machine.

A blocked connection now names itself, instead of blaming your credentials.

When a firewall or antivirus stops 3ds Max from reaching the internet, every part of the panel used to blame something else: the globe reported rejected credentials, a schematic import said OpenStreetMap had not answered, and place search said it found nothing. ValTerra now recognizes a refusal that came from your own machine and gives the fix with it: allow 3dsmax.exe through Windows Defender Firewall and your antivirus, then reopen the panel. A refusal like that is no longer retried, because retrying cannot change it, so the answer arrives at once rather than after half a minute of attempts. Place search now says when it cannot reach the internet, and a capture will not save an empty frame when the globe has no imagery loaded.

Captures now wait for the city, so nothing in the frame is half-built.

A photo used to be taken the instant you pressed the button, and each panorama face was shot with whatever detail had arrived by then — in a dense downtown, half-built towers. Both now hold the shutter until the stream of detail goes quiet, waiting on progress rather than on a stopwatch, so a busy city honestly takes longer while the status line names each face and how long it streamed. If the globe view runs out of memory mid-capture, the panel reloads it and frees the shutter instead of leaving a dead view behind. And when the globe cannot start at all, the note in the corner now prints the reason the imagery provider gave, instead of leaving you to guess between two hints.

The exported sun now knows where it actually is.

Until now the Daylight system left your scene on San Francisco time no matter where you scouted: the light was right on the globe and wrong in the render. It now carries true local time for any place on Earth — half-hour zones and summer time included — and the Motion panel clock reads the moment you scouted, checked against an almanac to within a third of a degree. A new ValTerra: true location rollout on the sun states the place, the local time and the UTC offset outright. One thing worth knowing: the City and Time Zone fields in Max's own Control Parameters cannot be written by any plugin, so they may still read San Francisco. They are decoration — the ValTerra rollout is the one to trust. The Buy a license link in the panel now opens this site.

Licensing arrives: paste a key, and that is the whole setup.

A free 30-day trial with every feature starts the first time you open the panel — no license key and no account needed. The globe still needs one free credential of your own, linked from inside the panel, exactly as it always has. When the trial ends, ValTerra quietly becomes the free Lite tier: nothing you already made is touched, and there is no watermark in any tier. Paste a license key into the panel and you are activated — there are no files to place. A Deactivate this machine link moves your license to another workstation yourself, without writing to us.

Updates are verified before they install.

The panel now checks every downloaded update against the official release feed before installing it, and update sources are pinned to that feed. Notifications about new versions arrive now — they never did before. The developer automation bridge stays off unless it is deliberately switched on. Nothing changes in importing, scouting or captures.

Maintenance release.

Corrections under the hood to how ValTerra talks to the imagery providers. Nothing changes in the interface, in what you can import, or in what your captures look like.

Imported context can no longer drift out of place.

Every anchored import — schematic city, terrain relief, imported blocks — now locks its transforms the moment it attaches. Rotating a piece by hand used to break its georeference silently; the anchor is now the one honest way to move a scene. The anchor itself sits on the ValTerra layer, so freezing the city no longer freezes the helper that repositions it.

The credit burned into a capture names the providers you can actually see.

The line had grown to half the frame, listing base-map and sea-floor sources that only describe distant filler on the horizon. It now names Google plus the imagery providers whose tiles are the picture in front of you. Nothing is lost: the complete list still goes into the file metadata, in full.

The credit line reads as part of the image, not a stamp on top of it.

Lighter fill, a much thinner outline and a faint shadow for legibility — the imagery shows through the letters and the letters still read over the imagery, on photos and on the panorama nadir alike. Opacity is clamped from below, so no setting can fade the credit past reading.

First pass at a translucent credit line.

Refined again in 0.4.86 after it still read as a stamp.

Attribution is now carried in the frame and in the file.

The Google Maps logo now stands on the globe whenever their imagery is on screen, drawn from Google's own attribution assets with the clear space their guidelines prescribe. Saved photos and panoramas carry the map-data credit burned in as one small line, so a capture that leaves ValTerra is already compliant when it reaches your compositor.

Everything the plugin makes reads as one row in the Layer Explorer.

Four sibling layers used to scatter across the top level. They now nest under a single ValTerra parent, so a scene hides, freezes or unloads as one thing — while the children keep their names for selective work.

Terrain relief joins the schematic, and massing renders clean.

A new import kind drapes the schematic over real elevation from open tiles, so a site sits on its actual topography instead of a flat plane. Schematic volumes had arrived with smudged shading where roof triangulation bled into the walls; a massing prism should be faceted, and now it is.

Schematic city and road splines from OpenStreetMap, worldwide.

A selection can now become schematic building volumes or the road network as splines, anywhere in the world, with ODbL attribution stamped on every node. Massing studies and layout work stop depending on any single imagery provider.