Common Rendering Settings¶

Rendering¶
Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Multi-Threading |
Enabling multi-threading improves UI responsiveness
|
Geometry¶

Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Normal & Tangent Space Generation Mode |
Select the mode to use to generate Normals and Tangents at triangle mesh vertices. Options are:
AUTO - selects the best mode depending on the data available and data update pattern
CPU - use the CPU. This uses mikktspace to generate tangent basis on the CPU
GPU - use the GPU. This allows deforming meshes to have their normal and tangent
basis updated on the GPU, to avoid the CPU overhead. Tangent basis generation does not use mikktspace in this case
Force GPU - force the use of the GPU to generate normals even when these are valid in the input mesh.
|
Back Face Culling |
Enable back face culling for ‘Single Sided’ primitives.
Note that this only applies to UsdGeom prims that have the custom ‘Single Sided’ flag set.
The ‘Double Sided’ flag is ignored because its default value is false, which is not
not a desirable default in a renderer using ray-tracing to simulate light transport
|
Wireframe Thickness |
Changes the thickness of the wireframe used when a primitive is flagged to be render
in wireframe mode.
|
Wireframe World Space Thickness |
When set, the wireframe thickness value is in world space instead of screen space
|
Shaded Wireframe |
If enabled, the wireframe is shaded with the materials assigned to the primitive
Otherwise the wireframe uses a plain white emissive material
|
Subdivision Global Refinement Level |
Selects a global subdivision level to apply to all primitives with Subdivision Schema set to
Catmull-Clark, Loop, or Bilinear. This over-rides the level selected in those primitives.
Each increment of 1 in this value increases the mesh triangle count by a factor of 4.
|
Subdivision Feature-adaptive Refinement |
Feature-adaptive refinement automatically increases or reduces refinement level based
on geometric features. This reduces the number of polygons used in flat areas for example
|
Clear Subdivision Refinement Overrides in all Prims |
Any assets with the setting
Refinement Override enabled will be disabled. This effectively ignores any prims who’s values have been customized in Refinement Level . |
Renderer-internal meters per unit |
Select the number of units per meter used by the renderer relative to the scale of the scene. Option are Default, Small, Medium and Big
The look of some materials depend on the scene scale, for example subsurface scattering and volumetric shading
|
Hide geometry that uses opacity (debug) |
This allows to quickly hide all objects which have opacity enabled in their material
|
Materials¶
Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Disable Material Loading |
Skip loading of materials, when opening the file.
|
Texture Max Resolution |
Textures larger than this will be downsampled.
|
Texture Compression Size Threshold |
Textures smaller than this size won’t be compressed. 0 disables compression.
|
Texture Streaming (toggling requires scene reload) |
Enables texture streaming which allows to load textures at a resolution which meets the view’s needs. This reduces memory usage and load times.
|
Texture Streaming Memory Budget (fraction of GPU memory) |
Limits memory budget used for texture streaming.
|
Texture Streaming Budget Per Request (in MB) |
Maximum budget per streaming request. 0 makes it unlimited. High or unlimited could lead to stalling during streaming.
|
Normal Map Mip-Map Generation (toggling requires scene reload) |
Enables mip-map generation for normal maps to reduce memory usage at the expense of quality.
|
MDL Animation Time Override |
Manually override the time value provided to MDL materials
|
MDL Animation Time Use Wallclock |
Enabling this option will use actual elapsed time for animation instead of simulated time
|
Lighting¶

Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Show Area Lights in Primary rays |
Makes area lights (Sphere Light, Rect Light, Disk Light, Cylinder Light) visible to the camera.
This has no influence on their visibility in reflections or refractions (e.g. behind glass)
|
Shadow Bias |
Configurable offset to apply to the shadow ray origin along the surface normal.
Helps reduce self-shadowing artifacts in low polygon geometry.
|
Use First Distant Light & First Dome Light Only |
The renderer will ignore all lights in the scene except for the first distant light
and the first dome light (the ordering determining the ‘first’ light of each type
is not user-controllable)
|
Dome Light |
|
---|---|
Hemisphere Sampling |
Select how to sample the Dome Light. Options are
Upper & Lower Hemisphere: Samples the entire Dome Light sphere. Use this option when scene objects
should receive light from “below” (below the horizon)
Upper Hemisphere Visible & Sampled, Lower Is Only Visible. Use this option when light is mainly coming
from “above” the horizon (the upper half of the Dome Light sphere)
Use As Env Map: select this option to uniformly sample the Dome Light. This may lead to highly noisy
renders (slow convergence) when the Dome Light contains small, bright spots
When using HDRI sky textures, it is recommended to use one of the first two options, to improve convergence speed of the render
|
Baking Resolution |
Select a ‘power of two’ texture resolution to use as a starting point for the
texture generated when baking the material bound to a Dome Light (if any)
|
Dome Light Texture Resolution Factor |
A factor applied to compute the final texture resolution for a DomeLight texture.
This applies both to Dome Lights with a material bound to them, and those simply using
a Dome Light texture, which might need to be converted to format different from its input format
(e.g.: a cubemap may be converted to a lat/long texture, or vice versa, depending on the renderer’s choice)
|
Dome Light Material Baking SPP |
Number of samples per output texel at which to bake the dome light (i.e. evaluate the Emission function of a
material bound to a DomeLight, if any). For example, baking a procedural cloudy sky to a texture
may require multiple samples to reach a certain image quality.
|
Simple Fog¶

Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Simple Fog |
Enables the use of a simple and fast exponential fog approximation available in both real-time and path-traced mode
Note this fog is very cheap, only models some absorption and does not model real light scattering
|
Color |
The color or tint of the fog volume
|
Intensity |
The intensity of the fog effect
|
Height-based Fog - Use +Z Axis |
Use positive Z axis for height-based fog calculations. Otherwise use the positive Y axis
|
Height-based Fog - Plane Height |
The starting height (in meters) for height-based fog
|
Height Density |
Density of the height-based fog. Higher values result in thicker fog.
|
Height Falloff |
Rate at which the height-based fog falls off
|
Distance-based Fog |
Enable distance based fog
|
Distance Density |
How dense the fog is at the ‘End Distance’
|
Start Distance to Camera |
Distance from the camera at which the fog begins
|
End Distance to Camera |
Distance from the camera at which the fog achieves maximum density
|
Flow¶

Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Flow |
Enables simulation and rendering of Flow volumes
|
Flow in Real-Time Ray Traced Shadows |
Enable Flow volumes in ray-traced shadows in real-time mode
|
Flow in Real-Time Ray Traced Reflections |
Enable Flow volumes in ray-traced reflections in real-time mode
|
Flow in Path-Traced Mode |
Enable Flow volumes in Path-Traced mode
|
Flow in Path-Traced Mode Shadows |
Enable Flow volumes in shadows cast by light primitives in Path-Traced mode
|
Composite with Flow Library renderer |
Use Flow’s built-in renderer and composite the results instead of ray tracing
through Flow volumes in the RTX renderer
|
Use Flow Library Self Shadowing |
Enable the casting of shadows by the volume on to itself when using Flow’s built-in
renderer
|
Max Blocks |
Maximum number of Flow volume blocks.
To keep rendering performance high and memory consumption low, this number needs to be kept
as small as possible, while also high enough to contain the entire volume.
|
Debug View¶

Setting |
Effect |
---|---|
Render Target |
Selects the name of the Debug render target to visualize
The drop-down menu contains a list of all the different render passes.
For full-viewport resolution, use another Anti-Aliasing algorithm than DLSS (in Render Settings > Ray Tracing > Anti-Aliasing)
|
Output Value Scaling |
Scales each per-pixel output value by this factor. Useful to increase or decrease relative differences
|