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Version: 3.5 (unreleased)

Release Notes 3.4

VRGS 3.4.1 – 3.4.3 – Vulkan by Default​

August 2026​

Everyone moves onto the Vulkan renderer in this release, stratigraphy now belongs to the objects you interpret rather than to a single mesh, and large projects save and open a great deal faster.

✨ New & Enhanced Features​

Vulkan is now the default renderer

  • VRGS starts in Vulkan for everyone. It is no longer a licensed extra, and your existing licence needs no changes.
  • You can have several 3D views open at once — separate model windows side by side, and the splitter panes that show other people's views during a multiuser field trip.
  • Selection is easier to see. Selected objects are drawn with an outline, and polylines hidden behind the outcrop show as ghosted lines that fade out with distance, so a busy interpretation stays readable.
  • Ortho panels, geobody centre lines, scale rings and edit handles, and stratigraphic zones all draw in Vulkan. An ortho panel keeps its image when you reopen a project, instead of coming back blank.
  • Palaeocurrents on a geobody can be drawn as a rose diagram or as a fan of arrows with the mean direction highlighted — a new option in the group's display properties.
  • Picking works where it used to fail. A mesh you have just imported can be picked straight away, without saving and reopening the project first. Ortho panels are picked in front of the rock behind them. Sticky Interp is honoured when you place orientations, faults and scanlines, and when you extend a polyline.
  • Scale bar labels let you choose how many decimal places to show.
  • To compare against the old renderer, clear Use Vulkan Renderer under Advanced & Diagnostics in the project properties and restart VRGS, or start it with -opengl.

Stratigraphy across the project

  • A rebuilt stratigraphic column. Work at System, Series or Stage level, zoom with the mouse wheel, scroll through geological time with Shift and the wheel, and see your project's own age range rather than the whole geological record. The column highlights the stratigraphy of whatever you pick in the model.
  • Objects carry their own stratigraphy — ICS units, your own group, formation and member names, and measured ages where you have them. It belongs to the object, not to a range on a mesh.
  • Stratigraphic markers are new: a point in the model with an age attached, for a measured horizon, a dated sample or a picked contact. You place, drag and delete them like any other waypoint. See Stratigraphic Markers.
  • More in Stratigraphy & the Stratigraphic Column.

Surfaces

  • Conformable stacks. Choose several polyline groups when you build an implicit surface and VRGS solves them together, so the horizons share every fold and can never cross one another. See Implicit Surfaces.
  • Faults on gridded surfaces. As well as the existing barrier trace, you can now define a fault as a map gap — a hangingwall and a footwall cutoff, with the ground between them left blank — or as a fault plane polygon, which pins the throw at the fault instead of smoothing the offset away across it. See Gridding Surfaces.
  • Implicit surfaces no longer curve back towards the regional trend at the edge of your data.

Discrete element modelling

Requires the DFN licence feature

The DFN and Discrete Element Model branches appear in the Interpretation tree only when your licence includes the DFN feature.

  • Grow Elements now grows the pack. Every step after the first used to report the same numbers, so the model never densified; it now grows towards the porosity you asked for, and tells you plainly when growing cannot reach it.
  • Packs settle instead of bouncing, so a model comes to rest rather than oscillating.
  • Porosity is now worth watching. It is measured against the settled pack rather than a box that is mostly air, so it changes as the model compacts — which is what it is for.
  • Adding elements to a large model is much faster.
  • Discrete element volumes survive a save and reload, and the model's domain box is drawn in the view and can frame it.
  • See the Discrete Element Model User Guide.

Terrain, globe and VR

  • Satellite terrain now works in the headset. Cesium and Google 3D Tiles stream and draw while you are in VR, terrain masking included; previously the imagery froze the moment you put the headset on. See the VR User Guide.
  • Terrain masking is tighter, and is included when you capture an image.
  • Starting VRGS without a headset connected no longer reports an error.

Billboards and multimedia

  • Billboards have a header bar: drag the board itself by its top edge, with the video controls moved up there and clear of the content.
  • The navigation and playback buttons are the same size, give feedback when pressed, and shrink together on a narrow board.
  • Rewind replaces the second stop button, repeat now loops the clip, and images and video keep their aspect ratio on presentation billboards.
  • Maintain Size is honoured by multimedia objects and by sample, waypoint and marker labels.
  • Video no longer sticks when a clip runs longer than the view it is playing in.
  • See Billboards.

Field guides

  • The field guide map now appears in the reader, not just while you are editing.
  • The map in the editor groups nearby markers together and zooms with the mouse.
  • A contents list on a Day page no longer breaks the editor, and a shared menu saves as a menu.
  • See the Virtual Field Guide Editor.

Import and export

Speed and project safety

  • Saving is much faster on large projects. Only the data you have actually changed is written.
  • Projects open faster, particularly those with many objects.
  • Building a mesh from a point cloud sizes the job to your data and your machine rather than running out of memory.
  • Upgrading a project to a new version takes a full backup first. See Working with Large Models.

A quieter messages panel

  • The panel now shows what you need to read. Years of internal reporting have moved to the log file, and timings never appear in the panel at all.
  • Progress bars show the time actually remaining.

Updates

  • Update notices now name the version correctly. An update already downloaded and waiting used to show as version 0.0.0.0, and reinstalling the version you are already running could produce a pointless notification.

🐛 Fixes​

  • Deleting a group of orientations now deletes the orientations inside it, rather than leaving them behind in the project.
  • Navigating no longer stalls every few seconds after a region fill fails to classify.
  • The flight path controls no longer restart playback when you pause, and the duplicate set of controls has gone.
  • The spreadsheet view opens the right interpretation object.
  • The voice control on a multiuser field trip no longer triggers on typing, and the camera tile has a blurred background.

In development, after 3.4.3​

These two features are documented on this site already, but they arrive in the build after 3.4.3.

GNSS field navigation, rebuilt. Support for RTK receivers and for receivers that use more than one satellite constellation, which the previous version could not read. A GNSS panel in the status bar shows your live fix whenever a receiver is connected, so a drop from centimetre to half-metre accuracy is visible while it happens. Navigate To takes any point you pick on the outcrop and gives you distance, bearing, height difference, how far you have drifted off the line and roughly how long the walk will take. Three new commands record an orientation, waypoint or sample where you are standing rather than where the mouse is pointing, each stamped with the survey quality it was taken at. See GNSS Field Navigation.

Analysis reports. A new document that collects stereonet statistics, DFN results, charts and views of your model into one page you can export as a PDF and send on. Figures come from the tools that already produce them, and text can be written by you or drafted by Athos, with every suggestion shown before it is applied. See Analysis Reports.