Explore your lighting by geolocation.Import a 3D model of any city on Earth.Match the camera to your drone photo.

Yes for schematic city and terrain, and the license itself says so: OpenStreetMap data is ODbL, which grants commercial use explicitly and excludes no field of endeavour. The one condition is the credit line, and ValTerra prepares the exact one for your scene. Photorealistic tiles are a different question, and it is not ours to answer: they arrive through your credential under your agreement with Google or Cesium, and that agreement — not us — decides what you may do with what it streams. Read it before client work. One thing we can state plainly, because their own pricing page does: Cesium's free Community plan is licensed for personal projects and evaluation, not for paid delivery, so a paid Cesium plan or your own Google Maps Platform key is the honest starting point. Full data sources & attribution.

Yes. The photorealistic 3D cities people know from Google Earth are offered to developers as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, and ValTerra imports the area you select straight into your scene, as geometry with textures. It connects to that service with your own Google Maps Platform key or a Cesium ion token, under your own account with that provider, rather than reading the Google Earth application. Have a look at their terms before client work. The steps are in the step-by-step guide.

Yes — the globe runs on one. It streams Photorealistic 3D Tiles, so until you paste a credential the globe shows only a low-resolution world map. The plugin links you straight to both options. A Cesium ion token takes a two-click sign-up and needs no payment details. Your own Google Maps Platform key puts you under Google's terms with Google billing you directly, and that route needs a billing account. Both run a free tier; we deliberately do not restate their numbers here, because they change — Cesium ion pricing (opens in a new tab) and Google Maps Platform pricing (opens in a new tab) are the current source. ValTerra itself never charges for imports. One thing to check before client work: Cesium's free Community plan is licensed for personal projects and evaluation, not commercial delivery — for paid client work use a Google Maps Platform key or a paid Cesium plan. The matching itself then runs on your own machine: ValTerra reads your drone photos there and does not upload them.

Three things account for almost every case, in this order. First: a fresh Cesium ion account does not hold the imagery yet — open Asset Depot in ion and add "Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles" to My Assets, because the token streams what your account holds, not everything ion offers. Second: the token needs the assets:read scope for all assets; the account's own Default Token always has it, a hand-made one often does not. Third, and easiest to miss: the token arrived truncated. It is a long single line, and selecting it by hand or copying it out of a wrapped e-mail drops the tail — use the copy button next to it and paste without pressing Enter. If the globe is still empty, the panel now prints the provider's own answer, such as INVALID_TOKEN, plus a network probe of both routes — send us that line and we will know what happened. The user guide covers the same ground in chapter 3.1.

Then look at the machine, not at the token. Windows can block outbound connections for a single program, and when it blocks 3ds Max the credential never leaves your computer — so every part of ValTerra reports a different symptom and none of them names the real cause. Our first outside user lost two Cesium ion accounts and a borrowed work token to exactly this before we found it. The panel now says so directly and prints a language-neutral code, PermissionError (WinError 10013), instead of guessing at your credentials. The fix is on your side and takes a minute: allow 3dsmax.exe in Windows Defender Firewall under Outbound Rules, and add the same exception in your antivirus if it keeps its own list. Corporate machines often have both. Nothing in ValTerra needs changing, and no new token will help.

Autodesk 3ds Max 2024, 2025, 2026, and 2027. The camera ValTerra creates is a native Physical Camera, and the sun takes the light class your renderer registers: in Lite it is the Daylight system of Autodesk 3ds Max; with a trial or a paid seat it is the ValTerra Sun, whose light is a CoronaSun when Corona is the active renderer and a standard directional light otherwise, and can be switched from the object to another sun class you have installed. The sky, moon, clouds and stars that come with the ValTerra Sun are Corona's: without Corona those parts stay quiet. 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. Anything you set on the light — its exclusion list, shadows, color, layer — is carried across, and your selection is left as it was. In Lite, where the sun is the Daylight system of Autodesk 3ds Max, press the Daylight button again after switching renderers and it is rebuilt for the new one. One thing to know before you hand a scene over: the ValTerra Sun is a ValTerra object, so a scene that holds one needs ValTerra installed — any tier, Lite included — to open as built; without it, Autodesk 3ds Max reports a missing plugin. Freeze for handover turns the sun's motion into ordinary keyframes for a render farm or a colleague without ValTerra.

A license key by email — one key for each seat you bought, all in one message — and the installer. Paste a key into the ValTerra panel: the plugin contacts getvalterra.com once at that moment, records your machine against that key's seat, and from then on runs without an internet connection. Changing computers is self-service: Deactivate this machine in the panel frees the seat, and the same key activates on the new one; if you forgot to deactivate, the panel on the new machine names the computer that still holds the seat and lets you release it. No ticket, no waiting. The installer is a single .mzp file covering Autodesk 3ds Max 2024–2027: you run it once from inside 3ds Max and the ValTerra button appears on your toolbar. Your purchase includes a year of updates, and every version released during that year stays yours to keep using after the year ends. Nothing ships physically and nothing switches off on a date. The download page lists the install steps and the system requirements.

One seat per person who runs ValTerra. Every seat is a full license with its own key: an order for five seats is five keys under one order number, you hand each person their key, and each key locks to one workstation at activation — more precisely, to one Windows user account on it, so two artists sharing a machine under their own logins need two seats. In your account you can give each key a label of your choosing — a workstation or a project, say — so you can tell them apart. Buy them together and the price per seat drops from five seats up; the table on the pricing page shows every total, so there is nothing to ask for and nothing to negotiate. If you outgrow your count later, add seats at the per-seat price for your new total as shown on the pricing page on that day — a Founders price on your first order does not carry over to seats you add after Founders pricing ends.

Nothing dramatic. Your license is perpetual: the plugin keeps working forever, on every version released during your update term. Renewing currently costs $75 per seat per year, or 30% of list for larger teams, and gets you continued updates and support. The renewal price is the one shown on the pricing page on the day you renew, whatever you paid for the seat. Skip a year if you like — you never lose access to what you own.

If ValTerra isn't a fit, write to us within 14 days of purchase for a full refund of your license fee. We'd rather have your honest feedback than your reluctant money. (And with a 30-day full trial plus a free Lite tier, we hope you'll never need this paragraph.) Read the full Refund Policy.

Really. 30 days, everything at full quality, clean output. Afterward, ValTerra Lite remains free forever and stays watermark-free — what changes is fidelity and one feature, never who owns the result: photorealistic geometry comes in at Medium (8 m), textures at Half resolution, captures at 1080p, and one photorealistic import covers at most 0.25 km². The one paid feature is the ValTerra Sun: Lite builds the Daylight system of Autodesk 3ds Max instead, and a ValTerra Sun already in a scene keeps working in Lite. Enough to work and to judge; not enough to deliver. Terrain stays at full quality; schematic city too, within 4 km² per OpenStreetMap request in Lite (no fixed area cap in the trial or a paid seat). We'd rather cap fidelity than deface your work.