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.
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
Ground plane	An invisible static floor at y = 0 so dropped objects don't fall forever. Turn off when your scene has its own floor collider. Applies on Play.

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 - a procedural sky gradient and the ambient it casts
Ambient	Intensity + colour - flat light added everywhere
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