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Rendering and Lookdev

The Designer renders in two layers: the live View Panel preview (Skia + wgpu, real time), and the production renderer (a GPU-accelerated path tracer for stills and AOVs). This section covers both, plus the texture transfer pipelines that bridge Designer-authored geometry to PBR-ready surfaces.

Two render paths

Path Used for Quality Speed
View Panel (Skia + wgpu) Live editing Approximate PBR 60+ fps
Production (path tracer) Stills, hero shots, .esk previews Reference PBR Seconds to minutes

Switching is automatic: scrub the time slider and you see live; Rendering > Render Selected triggers the path tracer.

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Materials

Each Mesh3D placement has a material. Materials store the PBR inputs (albedo, normal, roughness, metalness, IBL contribution). Edit in the Properties pane, or open the Hypershade for a node graph.

Most authoring needs the simple Properties pane; reach for Hypershade when chaining shaders, blending materials, or wiring procedural inputs.

Lights

A scene with no lights uses the framework's default ambient (the flat headlight you see by default). Add Rendering > Light > Directional for shadows + specular highlights. See Lights.

Quality

Rendering > Render Quality > … picks a samples-per-pixel preset:

  • Draft (4 spp): scrub-friendly previews.
  • Preview (12 spp): tutorial-grade renders.
  • Production (64 spp): marketing screenshots.
  • Final (256 spp): hero shots, print, logo gifs.

See Quality presets for timing benchmarks.

Color management

The Designer is color-managed end-to-end with OCIO. The default working space is sRGB (8-bit unorm output), with three other output transforms shipped:

  • Linear sRGB (for VFX comp pipelines).
  • ACEScg (for cinematic look-dev).
  • Rec.709 (for HD broadcast).

See Color space.

See also