Render Tab

When the Chisel render engine is active, these sections appear in Render Properties. Chisel uses a custom GPU ray-marching engine that displays SDF shapes in real-time with matcap shading.

Render Panel

Matcap

Chisel uses matcap (Material Capture) images for viewport shading.

Matcap

Matcap Selector

  • Description: Grid of available matcap thumbnails
  • Effect: Changes the viewport shading appearance

Use Specular

  • Type: Boolean
  • Default: False
  • Effect: Adds a secondary specular matcap layer for highlights
  • Only available when the selected matcap has a matching specular variant

A matcap is a pre-rendered sphere image that maps surface normals to colors. When the renderer computes a surface normal, it looks up the corresponding color in the matcap image.

Matcaps are stored in the addon’s matcap folders:

  • matcaps/diffuse/ - Base matcap images
  • matcaps/specular/ - Optional specular layers
  • matcaps/thumbnail/ - Preview thumbnails

Quality

Control the precision and range of the ray-marching renderer.

Quality

Max Steps

  • Description: Maximum ray-marching iterations per pixel
  • Range: 16 to 4096
  • Default: 248
  • Effect: Higher = better quality for complex scenes, slower rendering. Increase if you see artifacts on detailed shapes

Hit Threshold

  • Description: Distance from surface to consider a “hit”
  • Range: 0.0001 to 0.01
  • Default: 0.001
  • Effect: Lower = more precise surface detection. Decrease for fine detail, increase for performance

Max Distance

  • Description: Maximum distance a ray will travel before giving up
  • Range: 10.0 to 1000.0
  • Default: 100.0
  • Effect: Limits how far rays search. Increase for large scenes, decrease for performance

Performance

Optimize viewport responsiveness with adaptive quality, BVH acceleration, and view region clipping.

Performance

Adaptive Quality

Reduces rendering quality while navigating the viewport, then restores full quality when idle.

  • Enable Adaptive Quality: Toggle (default ON)
  • Navigation Steps: Ray-marching iterations during camera movement (4-128, default 32)
  • Navigation Threshold: Hit detection precision during movement (0.001-0.05, default 0.01)
  • Adaptive Resolution: Viewport resolution while interacting (1-100%, default 35%)

Boolean Solver

Controls the Blender modifier solver used for visualization meshes (not the SDF renderer).

  • Options: Float / Exact / Manifold
  • Default: Float
  • Float is fastest, Exact handles complex cases, Manifold requires manifold input

BVH Acceleration

Bounding Volume Hierarchy speeds up ray marching in scenes with many primitives.

BVH

  • Enable BVH: Toggle (default ON)
  • BVH Threshold: Minimum primitives before BVH is used (4-32, default 8)

View Region

Render only a portion of the viewport to reduce GPU load.

View Region

  • View Region Scale: Percentage of the viewport to render (10-100%, default 100%)

See Also