DJI has released DJI Terra V5.3.0, which adds cluster reconstruction of gaussian splatting, distributing a single 3DGS reconstruction across multiple machines and, in DJI's wording, "removing the previous reconstruction scale limit and improving reconstruction efficiency." Terra has supported cluster reconstruction since V5.1, but only for the mesh, point cloud and LiDAR pipelines. 3DGS was the one output type still pinned to a single workstation, which meant that the practical ceiling on a splat job was whatever VRAM and wall clock time one box could supply.
Terra's native 3DGS support arrived just over a year ago in V5.0, with DJI claiming reconstruction roughly twice as fast as its mesh pipeline and an input ceiling of up to 30,000 images. Corridor and large area survey work has been pressing against that ceiling ever since. What DJI does not state in the V5.3.0 notes is the supported node count, the interconnect or storage assumptions, or the per node hardware floor.
Two quality side changes also complement the release. The first is 3DGS reconstruction of water surface areas in visible light tasks, improving water rendering in GS output. Water is view dependent, specular and non-rigid, and standard 3DGS optimization tends to resolve it as a field of noisy, temporally inconsistent blobs or as a hole in the scene. The second is floater removal for 3DGS outputs, reducing airborne floating fragments. The semi transparent Gaussians that settle in empty space above and around a scene, produced where sky, thin structures or under observed regions leave the optimizer free to place geometry that satisfies the training views but collapses under novel view movement. It is possible this is DJI's own version of PPISP, which many should consider implementing. Neither change comes with published metrics, and DJI describes both as optimizations rather than new modes, but for anyone delivering splats to a client both are cleanup passes that currently have to be done by hand or in a third party editor.
V5.3.0 adds video file import into visible light projects with automatic frame extraction, supported on the Mavic 3T, Mavic 3E, Matrice 4E, Matrice 4T, Matrice 4D and Matrice 4TD. Extraction is automatic, so the frame selection heuristic is not exposed.
The rest of V5.3.0 is conventional survey work. Thermal-infrared reconstruction with ten palettes and point, line and area temperature measurement. Rolling shutter photo reconstruction gated behind an "Optimize RS Files" toggle for the Matrice 3TD, Matrice 4T and Matrice 4TD, an Execution Record view, LAS 1.4 and LAZ 1.4 point-cloud export, GTG-format TIFF elevation import, and the Korean KNGeoid26 vertical CRS.
The installer ISO also carries DJI Modify V1.6.0 and DJI Reality V1.0.1. DJI Reality being the viewer added to Terra in V5.2.0 for inspecting reconstructions. Separately on the downloads page, a DJI Terra TerraGS-CesiumJS Web Plugin is listed, pointing at browser side delivery of Terra splats into Cesium geospatial scenes.
A survey firm that has been splitting large sites into tiles to fit 3DGS on one machine, then reconciling the seams, can now treat the site as a single reconstruction. The water and floater work is less headline worthy but removes two of the most common reasons a delivered aerial splat gets sent back.
