Render Settings
The Render Settings panel holds the scene-wide rendering, physics, and post-processing configuration. Unlike per-object settings in the Inspector, these apply to the whole scene and take effect live.
It has an always-present Engine block, a small Physics block, a UI / HUD block, and an add/remove Effects (Volume) stack modelled on Unity's Volume system. Open it from File ▸ Render Settings… or by showing the Render tab.
Every control edits store.renderSettings live, so the viewport updates as you drag. Numeric labels are scrub labels (drag the label; Shift ×10, Alt ×0.1), and most rows have a ? help affordance you can hover for a one-line explanation.
📸 Screenshot - save as img/editor-render-settings.png
The Render Settings panel scrolled to show the Engine section (Tonemap, Anti-aliasing, Render scale, shadow controls) with the Effects (Volume) section and its + Add effect dropdown below.
Engine
The always-present pipeline configuration. Deep detail for each lives in the Rendering pages - this panel is where you set them.
| Control | Range | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tonemap | linear / ACES | Final colour mapping - linear is a hard stylized clamp (Godot look); ACES is a filmic highlight rolloff (Unity/Unreal HDR). See Post-processing. |
| Anti-aliasing | MSAA 4× / Off | Multisample AA smooths jagged edges (WebGPU guarantees 4× or off). Off only helps fill-bound scenes. |
| Render scale | 25 %–100 % | Internal render resolution, upscaled to the viewport. Below 100 % cuts GPU fill/bandwidth a lot (softer image). |
| Shadow strength | 0–1 | How dark shadowed surfaces become. 0 = shadows off. See Shadows. |
| Shadow cascades | 1–4 | Shadow-map splits across distance - more = sharper distant shadows, higher cost. |
| Shadow distance | 20–2000 m | Maximum range from the camera that the cascades cover (default 120 m). Past it nothing is shadowed, so raise this first when a large imported world looks flat. |
| Cached shadows | on/off | Re-render only moving shadow casters each frame; cache static ones. Fewer shadow redraws when most of the scene stays put. |
| Static batching | on/off | Merge unique static meshes per grid cell into single draw calls. See Static batching. |
| Batch threshold | ≤1–32 uses | Only meshes used at most this many times get merged; heavily-repeated meshes stay instanced. |
| Merge budget | 4–32 M verts | How much static geometry to merge into big chunks before falling back to per-object draws. |
| GPU cull (exp.) | on/off | Frustum-cull every object on the GPU and draw the opaque main pass indirectly. Default off. Gated on GPU capabilities - see below. |
| Depth prepass | on/off | Draw opaque depth once before shading so fragments hidden behind nearer surfaces skip the lit shader (early-Z). Helps scenes with heavy overdraw; a small cost on trivial ones. Default off. |
| Clustered lighting (Forward+) | on/off | Removes the per-fragment light limit. A compute pass sorts every light into a grid of screen tiles x depth slices each frame, and a surface shades only the lights whose range reaches it, so cost tracks how many lights are near a pixel rather than how many the scene has. Off, the renderer shades a fixed budget of 16 per fragment (the sun plus the point lights nearest the camera), so an imported town with 70+ lamps lights only a handful, and which ones changes as you move. Directional lights are always shaded either way. The camera preview inset keeps the fixed-budget path, since clusters are built for the main view. Default off. |
| Physical light falloff | on/off | How point and spot lights fade with distance. Off (default) they fade linearly to nothing at range, which is what scenes authored in this engine were tuned against. On, they use the inverse-square falloff Unity URP uses, so an imported Unity light is as bright here as it was there. Turn it on for a pack whose lamps look like floodlights: URP stores intensities meant for inverse-square, and under the linear curve they blow out to white while everything away from a lamp reads as black. It also undoes the extra brightness the importer adds to point lights for the linear curve. A look change only: no rebuild, no cost. |
| Draw distance | 0 (off)–1000 | Size-aware distance culling: an object stops drawing past (its bounding radius × this number). Big things stay visible far; small props cull close. |
See Performance for how batching, culling, and render scale trade off.
Controls gated on GPU capabilities
GPU cull (exp.) depends on your GPU supporting the WebGPU indirect-first-instance feature. The viewport probes this asynchronously and the panel updates the moment it knows:
- Capabilities still detecting → the toggle is disabled with a "detecting…" note.
- Supported → the toggle is enabled and turning it on takes effect.
- Unsupported → the toggle stays disabled and its help explains that GPU-driven culling can't run on this GPU (on a hybrid-graphics laptop, try switching to the discrete GPU via the viewport's GPU picker).
Physics
| Control | What it does |
|---|
See Physics overview for the simulation this feeds.
UI / HUD
How the screen-space UI (the UINode overlay) sizes itself to the window.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| HUD scaling | Reference height the HUD was designed at: Off (raw px), 720p, 1080p, 1440p, or 2160p. Off = UINodes are raw pixels, fixed size whatever the window (right for a HUD tuned to one resolution). Pick a height and every UINode scales by (viewport height ÷ that height), so the HUD keeps its proportions on any screen - offsets, sizes, and fonts scale together while each element stays pinned to its anchor. |
This is Unity's CanvasScaler "Scale With Screen Size" (height match), stored as renderSettings.uiReferenceHeight (0 = off). Imported HUD/menu packs are reconstructed at 1080 and turn it on automatically. The Viewport's UI edit layer reads the same value, so a dragged element lands where you drop it at any scale. Default: off.
Effects (Volume)
The Effects section is an add/remove stack - like a Unity Volume, an effect that is present is applied, and one you remove is off. Use the + Add effect… dropdown to add one; each added effect gets a header with a ? explanation and a 🗑 to remove it.
| Effect | Controls |
|---|---|
| Sky | Zenith / Horizon / Ground colours for a procedural gradient, or a cubemap. Also carries the sky's bodies: stars at night, a sun (derived from the scene's directional light when absent), and a moon drawn with a phase terminator. sunSquare makes both bodies square-edged, shaping the highlight they strike off glossy surfaces as well as the disc |
| Ambient | Intensity and colour. An equator colour plus optional sky and ground colours, blended by the surface normal's Y (Unity's Gradient ambient). All three equal gives a flat ambient |
| Fog | Mode (exp / linear), colour, and density or start/end distance |
| Color Adjustments | Post-exposure, contrast, saturation, hue shift, colour filter |
| Lift / Gamma / Gain | Three-way colour wheels for shadows / midtones / highlights (mid-grey = neutral) |
| Shadows / Midtones / Highlights | Independent tints for each tonal range |
| Bloom | Intensity, threshold, scatter |
| Vignette | Intensity, smoothness, colour |
| Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) | Intensity and radius - soft contact shadows in creases and corners |
The full explanation of each effect is on the Post-processing page; SSAO also has its own notes under PBR & lighting.
Reset to defaults at the bottom restores the entire Engine + Effects configuration.
See also
- Rendering pipeline overview - how these settings feed the frame
- Shadows - cascades, distance, cached shadows
- Post-processing - the Volume effect stack
- Performance - batching, culling, render scale
- Physics overview - the ground plane and simulation