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 is grouped into Lighting, Shadows, Image, Performance, Physics and UI / HUD sections, an index of the scene's Volume objects (when it has any), and the add/remove Scene effects stack modelled on Unity's Volume system. Open it from File ▸ Render Settings… or by showing the Render tab.
Every control edits the scene's render settings live, so the viewport updates as you drag. Numeric labels are scrub labels (drag the label; Shift ×10, Alt ×0.1), and every section and most rows have a ? you can hover for an explanation. Render settings are saved per scene; see Per-scene settings.
Lighting
How the scene's lights reach a surface. The lights themselves are Light components on objects.
| Control | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Clustered lighting (Forward+) | 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 (up to 32 per cluster). 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. Directional lights are always shaded. The camera preview inset keeps the fixed-budget path. |
| Physical light falloff | off | How point and spot lights fade with distance. Off, they fade linearly to nothing at range. 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 blow out to white. A look change only, with no rebuild and no cost. |
Shadows
The cascaded shadow maps cast by the scene's first directional light. Point and spot lights cast their own cube shadows only with castShadows on (see Shadows).
| Control | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shadow strength | 0–1 | 0.85 | How dark shadowed surfaces become. 0 = shadows off. |
| Shadow cascades | 1–4 | 3 | Shadow-map splits across distance: more = sharper distant shadows, higher cost. |
| Shadow distance | 20–2000 m | 120 m | How far from the camera the cascades reach. Past it nothing is shadowed, so raise this first when a large imported world looks flat. |
| Cached shadows | on/off | on | Re-render only moving shadow casters each frame and cache static ones. |
Image
How the final image is formed and resolved.
| Control | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tonemap | linear (stylized) / ACES (filmic) / ACES (Hill fit, sRGB) | ACES (filmic) | The one tonemap in the post composite. linear is a hard clamp (Godot look); ACES (filmic) is the Narkowicz fit; ACES (Hill fit, sRGB) is Stephen Hill's RRT + ODT fit with the sRGB curve, which puts 0.18 grey at 91 of 255 against ACES's 140. See Post-processing. |
| Dither | on/off | off | Adds up to one 8-bit code value of noise, re-rolled every frame, so dark gradients show grain instead of bands. |
| Anti-aliasing | MSAA 4× / Off | Off | Multisample AA smooths geometry edges. WebGPU guarantees only 4× or off. |
| Render scale | 25–100 % | 100 % | Internal 3D resolution, upscaled by the browser. Cost scales with its square: 50 % is a quarter of the pixels. If lowering it raises the FPS the scene is fill-bound; if not, the bottleneck is draw calls or CPU. |
| Frame cap | display, 30–120 fps | display | Cap the frame rate below the display's. At 60 on a 120 Hz screen every pass, simulation step and upload runs half as often, roughly halving power use. |
| Pixel budget | off, 0.2–4 MP | off | Render at most this many megapixels whatever the canvas size: a small embed stays sharp, a 4K full screen scales down just enough. 2.2 MP is about a 1080p image. Render scale still applies on top. |
Performance
Speed only: everything here leaves the image alone except Draw distance.
| Control | Range | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Static batching | on/off | on | Merge unique static meshes per grid cell into single draw calls. See Static batching. |
| Batch threshold | 1–32 uses | 8 | Only meshes used at most this many times get merged; heavily repeated meshes stay instanced. |
| Merge budget | 4–32 M verts | 8 M | How much static geometry to merge before falling back to per-object draws. |
| GPU cull (exp.) | on/off | off | Frustum-cull every object on the GPU and draw the opaque main pass indirectly. Gated on GPU capabilities, see below. |
| Depth prepass | on/off | off | Draw opaque depth once before shading so fragments hidden behind nearer surfaces skip the lit shader (early-Z). Helps scenes with heavy overdraw. |
| Draw distance | 0 (off)–1000 | off | 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
Scene-wide physics defaults, read when the simulation starts (at Play in the editor, at boot in the exported game). The section currently has no controls: the project-wide physics switches (stepping on the fixed clock, 2D physics) are in Project Settings. There is no implicit ground plane; see Physics overview.
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. Pick a height and every UINode scales by (viewport height ÷ that height), so the HUD keeps its proportions on any screen. |
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. Default: off.
Volume objects in this scene
When the open scene has objects with a Volume component, this section lists them. It is an index, not an editor: click a row to select the object and edit its shape, priority, blending and effect cards in the Inspector. The one control kept here is each volume's on/off switch.
Scene effects
The open scene's base look: an add/remove stack of environment and post-process cards. A card that isn't in the list is not applied. Use the + Add effect… picker to add one; each card has 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. Sun square makes both bodies square-edged |
| Ambient | Intensity and colour. An equator colour plus optional sky and ground colours, blended by the surface normal's Y (Unity's Gradient 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 | Mode (Gaussian 5 x 5, or Mip chain (wide) for a wider glow), intensity, threshold, scatter |
| Vignette | Intensity, Reach (the smoothness field), 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.
Reset to defaults at the bottom restores every setting and the effect stack.
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