Release Notes - 27th May 2026

New Features

New Ortho tiling and display pipeline

The ortho imagery (GIS imagery dataset) processing, streaming, and display pipeline has been rebuilt to improve performance and reliability.

With the new pipeline, image tile pyramids are always pre-generated down to full resolution during processing. This means larger imagery datasets no longer need to generate and cache high-resolution tiles on demand while users are viewing them, resulting in a smoother and more responsive viewing experience.

In some cases, imagery datasets may now take slightly longer to process, but this tradeoff significantly improves performance once the imagery is opened and viewed.

Note: the new pipeline only applies to orthoimagery data processed after the update (27th May 2026)

New lighting options

A new lighting control has been added to the main viewer toolbar, giving you more control over how 3D models are illuminated in the viewer.

Previously, lighting was applied from a fixed direction, which could sometimes make parts of a model appear too dark depending on the viewing angle. The new control makes lighting more flexible and improves visibility across a wider range of 3D model viewing scenarios.

The default mode is headlight lighting, where the light direction follows the camera as you move around the scene. This generally provides more even illumination and is the most useful option for day-to-day model inspection. An optional direction offset is also available for users who want to adjust the lighting angle while still keeping it camera-relative.

A new sun-based lighting mode is also available. In this mode, users can specify a date and time, and the viewer will calculate and apply the actual sun position for that moment. Sun-based lighting can also be used to cast shadows onto other 3D models and terrain, making it useful for more realistic visualisation and context-aware review.

Lighting currently only applies to 3D models and the new control is automatically displayed when the scene contains suitable 3D models. Support for applying lighting to 3D points in point clouds is planned for a future release.

Improvements/Changes

Pointerra3D Core

General

Removed the restriction on using ESRI spatial reference codes with advanced datum mode datasets.
Added support for gpx version 1.0 in video processing.
Improved scalability of the 3D model processing pipeline to allow processing of even larger models.
Improve processing of IFC models containing Site geometry nodes (typically unstructured meshes).
A new 3D Tileset source type has been added when importing 3D models. This mode should now be used when uploading Cesium 3D tilesets.
- This allows users to optionally specify the reference frame used to generate the tileset’s ECEF coordinates. In most cases, Cesium 3D Tilesets should already use a WGS84 ECEF reference frame in line with the specification. However, some tilesets are generated using non-conformant, non-WGS84 datums, which can result in positioning errors when displayed. The new reference frame option allows these offsets to be corrected during import.
- This is most likely to be useful for US customers working with tilesets generated by tools such as iTwin or Metashape that may create tilesets using NAD83-based reference frames rather than the expected WGS84 ECEF frame.

Added an ability to skip bad non-critical e57 header data instead of failing the processing.
Added support for using tiling with point cloud exports from polygons. This will allow larger exports to be created with polygons.

Portal UI

Show “inactive” next to inactive share links in company share table, and improve display of expired links.
Added NAVD-88 (meters) to quick options in the UI for vertical datum choice.
Autofill email address when exporting points as an authenticated share link recipient (ie when viewing a share link logged into a Pointerra account)
Added option to show descriptions in the config selector for photogrammetry and analytics creation.
Added option to include datasets in project exports to external locations.
New filter to show datasets in archived projects
Updates to CRS favorites page - Make display name editable. Added info box to show more details on the CRS.
When exporting DEM or pointcloud allow user to select favourite crs from list (if set up).
Tiled exports now display the units of the tiles.
Added a link back to the user profile page for authenticated guest users.
Company projects map view now includes map coverage tiles correctly when using the "include subfolders" option.

Viewer

Added new orthogonal measurement creation mode to allow measurements that are orthogonal to a specified direction (e.g. a road centerline)
Improvements to 360 video auto detection and display UI.
Improved visual display of selected 360 photo marker.
Added Detail Priority slider for 3D Models and renamed "Level of Detail" / "Skip" checkbox to "LOD" / "Use full detail only".
Improved the tile loading strategy for large vector and analytics datasets.
Implemented copy and paste for drawing tool objects.
Add translate option for drawing tool objects.
Added basic implementation of circle and arc drawing tools. Future releases will add more capability.
Added an option on mobile devices to show the current GPS location (and sync camera to this location) for devices with location capability.
Several improvements to the UI for the 2D overlay map.

Analytics

H-Frame/structured poles now calculate the center of the structure and use this in subsequent analytics stages.
Added a new poles and wires mode that can utilise PLS-CADD exported KML/KMZ files to create the network representation. This allows secondary vegetation analytics to be run against PLS-CADD design data.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue that could occur with ortho imagery that would not fully resolve when the project starts zoomed in.
Fix intermittent non-georeferenced model-only projects crashing the viewer when model is first shown.
Fixed photogrammetry jobs failing for certain coordinate systems.