Info Bar

The Chisel info bar at the top of the 3D View shows the current engine state and warns about anything that might affect performance or correctness.

What’s displayed

• Active engine — Chisel / EEVEE / Cycles. Click to swap.
• Shader compilation status — “Compiling shaders 3/14” style progress label during the first run, or simply “Ready” once warmed up.
• GPU backend — Vulkan / OpenGL / Metal. Includes a recommendation banner if OpenGL is active on Windows or Linux.
• Proxy / SDF view toggle — when relevant, a button that swaps between the SDF render and the proxy mesh view (e.g. for mesh-based editing operations).

Common warnings

• “Shaders not compiled — first run may take longer” — first viewport frame is compiling pipelines. Wait a few seconds; subsequent frames will be normal speed. See the shader compilation note.
• “OpenGL backend, Vulkan is much faster” — Blender is on OpenGL. Switch backend in Edit → Preferences → System → Backend for a 5–10× speedup.
• “Native library version mismatch” — armesher is out of sync. Open Preferences and click Update Native Libraries.

Hiding the info bar

The info bar is part of Chisel’s overlay set. It auto-hides when irrelevant (e.g., when not using the Chisel engine). You can also disable it from Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Chisel if you want a cleaner viewport.

See also

• Preferences — library status, GPU backend, shader recompile
• Render Engine — engine settings