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