Relevo User Manual

Real-world and procedural landscapes for 3ds Max 2023–2027 and Cinema 4D 2023.2 or later, with photoreal V-Ray looks. Version 1.1.0. Cinema 4D users: start with Relevo for Cinema 4D.

Quick start (5 minutes)

This builds a real mountain from free data with no API key, then makes it photoreal. The sidebar on the left lists the steps in order, and Cancel stops any step at any time.

1. In 3ds Max, open Relevo > Relevo Panel.
2. 1 Location: type a place in the search field (for example Pico Ruivo, Madeira or Matterhorn) and press Enter, or click anywhere on the map. The orange box is exactly what will be built. Use the 1 km … 20 km buttons to set its size; 5 km is a good first size.
3. 2 Terrain data: leave Real-world data selected, with Elevation source set to Copernicus 30 m — free, worldwide, no key and Satellite photo set to No photo.
4. Click Generate terrain ▶ at the bottom right. The progress bar and status line show each step. A 5 km terrain takes about 10 to 40 seconds.
5. 4 Materials & look: the first time only, click Download free CC0 starter pack. Then choose a look (for example Temperate Mountains) and click Apply look.
6. 5 Light & camera: click Apply sun, sky and haze, then Create hero camera.
7. Render with V-Ray (Shift+Q).

Install & uninstall

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with 3ds Max 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026 or 2027. Each version has its own installer, and you can install several side by side.
• V-Ray 6 or 7 for 3ds Max, for the photoreal looks, sun and sky, and displacement. Without V-Ray, terrains still build, and looks are applied as a baked texture on a Physical Material.
• Chaos Scatter (included with V-Ray) is optional, for vegetation.
• An internet connection for real-world data, the map and the material download.

Install

1. Close 3ds Max. The installer checks this and asks you to close it if it is running.
2. Run the installer for your version, for example Relevo_1.0.0_Max2026_Setup.exe. No administrator rights are needed: Relevo installs for your Windows user only.
3. Start 3ds Max. A Relevo menu appears in the main menu bar, next to Help.
4. Run Relevo > Run Self-Test once. See Self-test.

Files are installed to %APPDATA%\Autodesk\ApplicationPlugins\Relevo_<version>.bundle, for example Relevo_2024.bundle. Your settings, licence and material library are kept in %APPDATA%\Relevo, and logs in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Relevo\logs.

Update

Close 3ds Max and run the new installer over the old one. Your settings, licence and materials are kept.

Uninstall

Use Windows Settings > Apps > Relevo for 3ds Max 2026 > Uninstall. The zip version has Uninstall.bat instead. Your materials and settings in %APPDATA%\Relevo are not deleted. Delete that folder by hand if you want to remove them too.

Self-test

Relevo > Run Self-Test checks the installation step by step:

• Python and the bundled libraries (NumPy, Pillow, GeoTIFF support);
• a small procedural terrain, built in the scene;
• whether the data servers can be reached;
• whether V-Ray is present.

It ends with a report and saves it to the log folder. If anything is red, the report says what to do. When you ask for support, send that report together with relevo.log. Relevo > Open Log Folder opens the folder with both files.

The panel

Long jobs run in the background, so 3ds Max stays responsive while data downloads. Only the final step, building the objects in your scene, happens in the foreground, and it is a single undo step (Ctrl+Z removes the whole build).

Location & map

Step 1 Location has the map built in. Pop out ↗ (or Relevo > Map of the Area) opens the same map in a large window of its own. The map, the Latitude / Longitude fields and the Area size are always in sync.

Going to a place

• Search: type a place name (Mount Teide, Grand Canyon), or paste coordinates (28.2724, -16.6425) or a Google Maps link copied from your browser. Then press Enter or click Go to.
• Type coordinates in the Latitude and Longitude fields above the map. North and east are positive; south and west are negative.
• Click the map: the terrain centre moves to where you clicked. The nearest place name appears under the map.

Map types

Famous places

On 1 Location, click ★ Famous places… to open a gallery of 62 landscapes around the world. Each has a satellite-and-relief thumbnail, an area size and a matching Look. Search by name, country or type ("volcano", "Norway", "canyon"), or filter by category: Mountains, Volcanoes, Canyons & deserts, Coasts & islands, Fjords & valleys. Double-click a place, or select it and click Use this place. The coordinates, area size and Look are filled in and the map jumps there, so you only need to click Generate terrain.

Every place was checked when the library was built: its coordinates against the OpenStreetMap geocoder, and its relief against real elevation data. The highest point of each area matches the real summit.

Terrain data

At the top of step 2 Terrain data, choose one of four modes. Only the settings that matter for your choice are shown.

• Real-world data: the place from step 1, up to 200 km.
• Large region (tiles): up to 1,000 km; see Large regions.
• Planet globe: see Planet globe.
• Procedural (noise): an invented landscape; see Procedural terrain.

Elevation sources

API keys

The API keys card holds the Google Maps key and the OpenTopography key.

• Show reveals the key while you type or check it.
• Test key checks the Google key against each Google API and tells you exactly what is missing.
• Tick Remember on this computer to keep a key for next time. It is saved for your Windows user in %APPDATA%\Relevo\relevo.ini. Untick it to forget the key. Keys are never saved in your .max file.

Estimate downloads / API cost shows the number of requests before you generate. Paid requests are capped per job (2,000 by default), so a typo cannot run up a large bill.

Auto: the best free data for each country

The default elevation source, Auto, picks the most detailed free data for the place you chose. It uses national LiDAR where a country publishes it and Copernicus 30 m everywhere else. Under the drop-down, a line shows what Auto will use for the current location, for example "Here: swissALTI3D (Switzerland), ~2 m (gaps filled from Copernicus)".

• Areas the national data does not cover, such as the sea or land across a border, are filled from Copernicus. Small holes, such as buildings removed from a terrain model, are interpolated from the surrounding ground.
• If a national service is down, Auto moves on to the next source and notes it in the log.
• National LiDAR is a Pro feature. On the Free tier, Auto uses Copernicus 30 m.
• For Switzerland, areas larger than about 9 km use the next available source, because swissALTI3D is delivered as many 1 km tiles.

Large regions (tiles)

For whole islands, mountain ranges or countries (up to 1,000 km), choose Large region (tiles) at the top of 2 Terrain data. Set the size with Area size on the Location page (50 km, 100 km, 500 km…); the map shows the tile grid.

• Tiles: Automatic makes tiles of about 12 km, up to 10 × 10. Each tile becomes its own object, RV_Region_r02c03 and so on, on the layer Relevo Region.
• Less detail further from the centre: the centre tiles get 2049 px height maps, then 1025 px, and the outer tiles 513 px. For tiles 60 m per pixel or coarser, Relevo downloads AWS Terrain Tiles instead of 30 m rasters, which keeps a 500 km region at a manageable download.
• No seams: tiles are laid out as true squares on a projection centred on the region. Their shared edges are stitched, so neighbouring tiles meet exactly, even when their detail differs.
• Earth curvature (optional) lowers the ground with distance from the centre: about 2 km at 160 km and 20 km at 500 km. Use it for long-lens horizon shots.
• 4 Materials & look > Apply look applies the look to every tile. Open saved terrain… rebuilds a saved region from its <name>_region.json without downloading anything.
• To keep dozens of tiles responsive, region tiles use at most 128 plane segments and no viewport smoothing. Detail comes from each tile's height map and render-time displacement.

Planet globe

Choose Planet globe at the top of 2 Terrain data and click Generate terrain. It builds the whole Earth for space, flyover and title-sequence shots:

• RV_Globe, a sphere with the relief built into its vertices. Longitude 0° faces +X, 90°E faces +Y, and the North Pole is +Z.
• Cloud-free Sentinel-2 satellite colour, glossy oceans and rough land (a roughness map), and a normal map for fine relief shading. All are equirectangular maps you can reuse.
• RV_Globe_Atmosphere, a thin shell that glows blue at the limb, and a sun light, all on the layer Relevo Globe.

Plane & detail

The terrain is a real-size Plane object named RV_Terrain. It has a TurboSmooth modifier that sets the level of detail, and it is displaced by the height map. Step 3 Plane & detail controls how much geometry the viewport and the render get.

• Plane segments (per side): the grid of the base plane.
• Viewport subdivisions: the TurboSmooth levels you see while working. Each level multiplies the polygons by 4.
• Render subdivisions: the TurboSmooth levels used at render time only.
• The orange line shows the resulting polygon counts. Relevo lowers the viewport level automatically if the viewport would go above about 8 million polygons.
• Render-time displacement (recommended): V-Ray, Corona or Arnold adds full displacement detail at render time, so the viewport can stay light.
• Create flat plane (no height data) creates just the subdivided plane, at the Area size from step 1.
• Apply detail to current terrain changes the segments and subdivisions of the terrain already in the scene, without downloading anything again.

Google key setup

Google is optional. The free sources need no key. If you want Google satellite imagery:

1. Go to console.cloud.google.com and create or select a project.
2. Billing: link a billing account to the project. Google refuses every Maps request without one, even within the free monthly credit.
3. APIs & Services > Library: enable Maps Static API (satellite photo on the terrain). Also enable Maps Elevation API for Google heights, and Map Tiles API for the Satellite HD map type.
4. APIs & Services > Credentials > Create credentials > API key. Open the key and set:
   • Application restrictions: None, or IP addresses with your public IP. Do not use "Websites (HTTP referrers)": 3ds Max is not a website, so Google rejects referrer-restricted keys.
   • API restrictions: Restrict key, and tick the APIs you enabled.
5. In Relevo, open 2 Terrain data > API keys, paste the key into Google Maps key, and click Test key. It makes two tiny requests and tells you, per API, whether it works and what is wrong if not. Tick Remember on this computer to keep the key.

Procedural terrain

Invented landscapes from noise, with no internet needed. In 2 Terrain data, choose Procedural (noise).

Materials & look

A look turns a bare terrain into a photoreal one. It analyses the terrain (slope, height, curvature, water flow, sun exposure), builds masks from that, and layers real PBR materials (rock, scree, grass, soil, snow, sand) in a V-Ray blend material with displacement.

1. PBR texture library. Click Download free CC0 starter pack once: 15 materials from ambientCG, about 30 MB each at 2K. You can cancel and resume. Add my texture folder… adds your own sets; Megascans, Poliigon, Poly Haven and similar sets are recognised automatically.
2. Look: Temperate Mountains, Alpine, Desert Canyon, Volcanic, or Coastal / Mediterranean. The table shows which material each layer will use. Change any layer with its drop-down, and set its Texture size (metres per texture repeat, or automatic).
3. Close-up detail switches V-Ray displacement to full 3D, for ground-level cameras. It is slower.
4. Click Apply look. A preview appears in the card. The V-Ray material, masks and a report are written next to the terrain.

Material Editor

Every terrain material Relevo creates is added to the 3ds Max Material Editor, with each texture in its own named slot so you can inspect and change it:

• Slate Material Editor gets a view named Relevo. It holds the terrain material with its whole map tree, plus the slope map and the OpenStreetMap masks as loose nodes you can wire into your own networks. The view is replaced on every build.
• Compact Material Editor: the material goes into a free sample slot. Relevo never overwrites a material you made yourself.

After Apply look, the layered V-Ray material replaces it in the same places, with a Bitmap node for every layer and mask. The Material Editor card on step 4 has:

• a checkbox to turn the automatic update off;
• Send terrain material now;
• Open Slate Material Editor.

Lighting & camera

• Sun azimuth / elevation: a low sun (5 to 20 degrees) from the side shows relief best.
• Turbidity: 2 gives a crisp, clear sky and 6 a hazy one. Visibility sets the distance of the aerial haze, which is what makes a landscape read as big.
• Apply sun, sky and haze creates a V-Ray Sun with a V-Ray Sky environment and aerial perspective (requires V-Ray).
• Create hero camera places RV_Camera about 110 degrees from the sun for side light, framed on the terrain.

Vegetation scatter (Chaos Scatter)

Select your own grass, shrub, tree or rock models in the scene. Then, on 4 Materials & look, click Use selection as grass (or shrubs, trees, rocks) before Apply look. Relevo creates Chaos Scatter objects that use the look's masks, so trees grow in damp valleys and not on cliffs, and rocks gather below steep faces. Scatter needs Pro.

Rendering tips

• For wide shots, use V-Ray's 2D displacement (the default). Use Close-up detail only for ground-level cameras.
• Use a real-world scale camera: 35 to 85 mm lenses flatten mountains nicely.
• If the terrain looks like a model, it is almost always missing haze: increase Visibility distance or turbidity a little.
• For a camera near the ground, use at least 4096 px heightmaps and Micro-detail 2 to 5 m, or OpenTopography 1 m data where available.
• Relevo > V-Ray Diagnostics writes a file for support if a V-Ray setting is not applied.

Cancel & the Esc key

Cancel is always available while something runs: terrain generation, material downloads, Apply look and the key test.

• Click Cancel (Esc), or press Esc while the Relevo panel is the active window.
• The panel is usable again immediately. Change settings and click Generate again.
• Nothing half-finished is added to your scene. Any result that arrives after you cancelled is discarded.
• Closing the panel also cancels the running job.

If that .NET error window keeps coming back

1. Click Continue a few times. If it stops, save your scene with a new name (File > Save As) straight away and restart 3ds Max.
2. If it keeps reappearing, 3ds Max cannot recover. Open Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), select 3ds Max and click End task.
3. Restart 3ds Max. Your latest autosave is in Documents\3ds Max <version>\autoback. Open the newest AutoBackup*.max.

Troubleshooting

When something fails, Relevo shows a window with what went wrong and what to do. Show Details… in that window has the technical message, and Open manual brings you here. Everything is also written to the log (Relevo > Open Log Folder, file relevo.log).

Error messages

Relevo for Cinema 4D

The Cinema 4D edition uses the same data engine as the 3ds Max edition: Auto elevation with national LiDAR, Copernicus, OpenTopography, your own DEMs, Google satellite photos, OpenStreetMap, large regions, the planet globe, procedural terrain and the Looks. One licence works in both applications on the same computer.

Requirements

• Cinema 4D 2023.2 or later (2024, 2025, 2026 and newer), on Windows 10/11 (64-bit) or macOS 12 or later (Apple silicon or Intel). Cinema 4D 2023.0 and 2023.1 are not supported; update to 2023.2, which is a free update.
• Optional: V-Ray 6 or 7 for Cinema 4D. Without it, Relevo makes Cinema 4D Standard materials, which render in the Standard and Physical renderers.

Install

• Which download: C4D2024-2026 is for Cinema 4D 2024, 2025 and 2026; C4D2023 is for Cinema 4D 2023.2. On a Mac, pick AppleSilicon (M1 and later) or Intel (Apple menu > About This Mac shows the chip). If you use two Cinema 4D generations, install both downloads: they share one folder and add up.
• Windows: close Cinema 4D and run Relevo_1.1.0_C4D2024-2026_Windows_Setup.exe (or the C4D2023 one). It installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Relevo C4D and adds that folder to Cinema 4D's plugin search path (the g_additionalModulePath setting), so every installed Cinema 4D version finds it, including versions you install later.
• macOS: double-click the download (…_macOS_AppleSilicon.zip or …_macOS_Intel.tar.xz) to unpack it, then double-click Install Relevo.command. It copies the plugin to ~/Library/Application Support/Relevo/C4D/Relevo, clears the download quarantine flag on the included libraries, and links it into the plugins folder of every Cinema 4D version on the Mac. Run it again after installing a new Cinema 4D version, or add the folder in Settings > Plugins. If macOS says the script cannot be opened, right-click it and choose Open.
• Manual install (both): copy the Relevo folder anywhere, then in Cinema 4D open Edit > Preferences > Plugins, click Add Folder…, choose the folder that contains Relevo, and restart Cinema 4D.

After restarting Cinema 4D, open Extensions > Relevo > Relevo Run Self-Test once. The panel is Extensions > Relevo > Relevo. It is dockable: drag its title bar into your layout and save the layout.

The panel

1. 1 Location: search for a place or paste coordinates or a Google Maps link, pick one of the famous places, or click the map. Click puts the terrain there, drag pans, Shift + drag draws a new area and the wheel zooms. The orange square is what will be built.
2. 2 Terrain: choose what to build (a real place, a large region, the whole planet or a procedural landscape) and where the data comes from. Auto is the best free choice.
3. 3 Mesh & Look: level of detail, render subdivision, which renderer the materials are for, scene scale, and the Look.
4. 4 Keys & Licence: Google and OpenTopography keys (only if you use those services), and your licence.
5. Click Generate. Cancel stops the download at any time; your scene is only changed once the data is ready.

How the terrain is built

• Heights are baked into the mesh. RV_Terrain is a polygon object whose points carry the real heights, so the viewport shows exactly what renders, in every renderer, with no displacement settings. Detail finer than the mesh is added by a detail normal map that holds only the relief the mesh cannot show, so slopes are not shaded twice.
• Level of detail: Draft 256 × 256, Standard 512 × 512, High 1024 × 1024 and Ultra 2048 × 2048 polygons. Change detail of RV_Terrain rebuilds the mesh at a new level without downloading again, and keeps its material. Render subdivision (1–3) puts the terrain under a Subdivision Surface that only subdivides at render time.
• Axes: +X is east, +Y is up, +Z is north, and the terrain is centred on the origin. With Place at true altitude, the lowest point sits at its real height above sea level.
• Units: Relevo reads Project Settings > Scale and builds at real size (1 m = 100 units in a default centimetre scene). Use Scene scale (1:10, 1:100, 1:1000) for very large terrains, regions and globes, and raise the viewport clipping (Project Settings > View Clipping: Huge) if distant parts disappear.
• Materials: Automatic makes V-Ray materials when the document renders with V-Ray and Standard materials otherwise. Render with V-Ray switches the render settings to V-Ray. For Redshift, Octane or Corona, the colour and normal maps are in the output folder (*_albedo.png, *_look_albedo.png, *_detail_normal_*.png) and plug straight into their materials.
• Looks (Pro): the chosen look is baked into one colour map from real PBR textures, blended by slope, height, water and sun. Choose a look before you click Generate, or apply it later with Apply look to RV_Terrain. Download the free CC0 materials once for the full looks.
• OpenStreetMap (Pro): buildings (walls and roofs as separate materials through a Roofs polygon selection), road meshes and linear splines for roads, rail and rivers go under the RV_OSM null.
• Regions are built under the RV_Region null, one polygon object per tile, with shared edges. The globe goes under RV_Globe_Group: north is +Y and longitude 0° faces +X.
• Each object has an Annotation tag named Relevo with its data sources, attribution and asset file. It travels with the .c4d file.

Files and settings

Maps are written to the Output folder: by default the tex/Relevo folder next to your saved .c4d file, or Documents/Relevo for an unsaved scene. Settings, the licence and the material library are shared with the 3ds Max edition (%APPDATA%\Relevo on Windows, ~/.config/Relevo on macOS). Logs are in Extensions > Relevo > Relevo Open Log Folder, and Create Support File zips them for support without any keys.

Cinema 4D troubleshooting

Licence, trial & updates

• Free, forever, including commercial work: procedural terrain, real-world terrain up to 2048 px (Copernicus, AWS), plane and level-of-detail controls, the map, Famous places and Material Editor slots.
• Trial: the first 14 days include every Pro feature.
• Pro: V-Ray looks and PBR materials, Chaos Scatter, OpenStreetMap, national LiDAR (Auto), OpenTopography and local LiDAR, maps above 2048 px, large regions and the planet globe.

Activating

1. Open Licence (the badge at the top right of the panel, or the sidebar).
2. Paste the key from your purchase e-mail and click Activate. Store keys (like 38b1460a-5104-…) are activated online once per computer. Offline RV1-… keys from your seller need no internet.

• Perpetual licences work forever and include a year of updates. When a new version comes out after your updates end, the Licence page says so and offers Renew maintenance. The version you have keeps working. Enter a renewal key the same way as a licence key.
• Subscriptions work while they are paid, with a 7-day grace period for late renewals.
• Your licence is re-checked in the background every few days and keeps working for 45 days without internet. Check licence now re-checks immediately.
• To move to another computer, click Remove licence from this computer. This frees the seat online, and you can then activate on the new computer.
• Activation sends only your key and an anonymous machine identifier. No computer name, user name or project data leaves your machine.

Updates

Relevo checks once a day, in the background, whether a newer version exists. If it does, an Update … available button appears at the top of the panel. Relevo > Check for Updates checks immediately. Install an update by running its installer over the current version; your settings, licence and materials are kept.

Getting help

Relevo > Create Support File puts a zip on your Desktop with the logs and system details support needs, never your licence or API keys. Attach it to your support e-mail.

The panel remembers your settings between sessions (location, sources, detail, look, lighting). API keys are only kept if you tick Remember on this computer.

Data sources & credits

Each build also writes the credits for the data it used into <name>.json.

FAQ

Do I need a Google API key?

No. Copernicus elevation, the free map types and the Look system need no key and give the best photoreal results.

Can I keep working in 3ds Max while it generates?

Yes. Downloads run in the background. Don't press Esc in the viewport while it runs (see Cancel & the Esc key).

Where are my files?

Relevo > Open Output Folder, or Open next to the output folder on step 3. By default this is <project>\sceneassets\images\Relevo.

Can I just get a subdivided plane?

Yes: step 3, Create flat plane (no height data).

How do I rebuild with different settings?

Change the settings and click Generate again. To change only the mesh density, use Apply detail to current terrain on step 3; nothing is downloaded again.

Why is my terrain offset or at the wrong place?

Check the sign of the coordinates: west longitudes and south latitudes are negative. The map window shows exactly where the box is.