Choosing a renderer

One renderer ships. The choice that comes with it is the integrator: hybrid ray tracing for interaction, or the path tracer.

Every viewport draws the scene through a renderer. One ships, a real-time GPU renderer, and it is what every page here assumes. It does everything described across these docs: lit meshes, shadows, reflections, volumes, splats, post effects, and the 2D/3D composite.

The choice you do make is which integrator resolves the lighting, on that same scene.

The built-in GPU renderer

It is real-time, with a ray-tracing layer on by default, so feedback stays interactive while lighting stays accurate. Shadows and ambient occlusion are traced from the start, though a light still has to opt in to casting one. Reflections and bounced global illumination are there to switch on. To stay fast, the visible frame is read first and rays are traced only for what that pass cannot see.

What it covers:

• PBR materials, lights, and shadows (see Materials, Lights)

• Image-based lighting and environments (Environment & image-based lighting)

• Volumes, Gaussian splats, and analytic shapes

• Screen-space and post effects (Post effects)

• The full 2D-over-3D composite (Layers & compositing)

It runs the same on macOS, Windows, and in the Web Player, so a build matches its export. Ray traversal is the one difference: a desktop GPU that advertises ray query does it in hardware, and the browser falls back to a software BVH over the same scene data.

Realtime or Path Traced

Both integrators run on the same scene: the same acceleration structure, the same lights, the same materials. Switching between them re-authors nothing.

• Realtime is the analytic hybrid described above, and the default.

• Path Traced is an unbiased path tracer. In the viewport it takes one sample per pixel per frame at a single bounce and cleans that up with a temporal denoiser, reprojecting its history as you orbit rather than restarting. That is what keeps it interactive, and holding it to one bounce is what keeps its brightness close to Realtime's instead of jumping as you switch. pt_samples and pt_max_bounces (8) are the converged settings and do not apply to the viewport: an export reads them, accumulating to the sample budget at the full bounce depth. Raise pt_samples for a still or an export, not to clean up the preview.

Both live on the Render Settings node, which is one per composition. The viewport toolbar also carries a button showing the current mode; clicking it flips to the other. That button writes to the composition rather than to one viewport, so every viewport follows it.

External renderers

The renderer is pluggable by design. The intent is that third-party engines, stylised and NPR renderers among them, register themselves and appear in the viewport toolbar's renderer dropdown, including from plugins. Each would advertise its own capabilities, such as whether it supports volumes, splats and progressive refinement, and expose its own settings.

See also

• The render node

• Cameras

• The viewport

• Making it faster