This one is coming down the tracks fast – I expect a full release very soon, but for tonight, here’s a beta you can try out immediately.
New: 3D Buildings
Real-world buildings are now available in the /3d view, making it much easier to plan shots involving skylines, city landmarks, and urban foregrounds.
Buildings:
- appear in both Orbit and First Person views
- sit on the terrain at their correct elevation
- cast and receive realistic shadows
- can be inspected to view height and other available details
- remain visible after dark with subtle night-time illumination
- click to inspect details about an individual building or building part
PRO subscribers gain access to the Standard building dataset, while MAX subscribers receive a higher-detail Enhanced building dataset (much more info on click, and more detailed models in some cases)
Note: the buildings are not high fidelity models, but rather the sort of block-based simplified models commonly seen in 3D maps and navigation systems in cars. Importantly, coverage is global and not limited just to major cities. Generally, heights and footprints are accurate for major buildings - you can click to verify this yourself if in doubt.
Important: 3D buildings are bandwidth intensive – viewing enhanced buildings in a major urban location may download an additional ~50MB or more of data. A powerful computer and fast internet connection is recommended. Subsequent visits should use cached data and load much more quickly.
Walk through the scene
First Person view is now fully walkable using the keyboard arrow keys.
Instead of rebuilding the terrain every time you move (either by moving the pin or walking), the scene stays in place while you walk, making it much quicker to explore nearby viewpoints and fine-tune compositions.
Visual Search improvements
Visual Search gains several improvements, including:
- a new Gibbous Moon preset
- hold the Command key while drawing to begin the search from today’s date instead of the selected date
- Use Command-Right Arrow or Command-Left Arrow to move between result dates (updated keyboard shortcuts to avoid a clash with the new walk cursor key interaction)
- fixes for duplicate search results
- improved handling of daylight-saving transitions in certain time zones
3D improvements
This release also includes numerous improvements to the /3d experience:
- smoother scene repositioning when moving short distances
- constant-size pins and azimuth lines while zooming
- improved terrain and building alignment for greater positional accuracy
- cleaner rendering of Sun and Moon paths
- improved mini-map behaviour
- many performance and rendering refinements
