Chisel
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F12 Render

With the Chisel engine active, pressing F12 renders the SDF scene through the active camera straight to Blender’s Render Result. There is no separate Chisel render operator — Chisel is a real Blender render engine, and F12 (the standard render.render) goes through its render() method like any other engine.

How it behaves

  • Renders through the active camera. The frame uses the scene camera’s projection — sensor fit, shift, clip planes, pixel aspect — and supports both perspective and orthographic cameras. The result lands in the Render Result’s Combined pass.
  • Honors the output settings. Width and height come from Output Properties (Resolution X / Resolution Y × Resolution %), exactly like any other engine.
  • Always full quality. The F12 path forces the adaptive navigation pass off, so the still renders the full step budget in one shot — no 0/1/1/1 settling. It also always renders in Rendered shading (per-object colors) regardless of the viewport’s current shading mode.
  • Opaque background. The frame is filled with the world color (black if no world) at full alpha, rather than the transparent clear the viewport uses in non-Rendered modes.
  • Uses the scene matcap. It resolves the Matcap panel selection, falling back to the default matcap if none is set.

Limitations

  • A camera is required. With no active scene camera the render aborts with the error “Chisel F12 render needs an active scene camera.” and nothing is produced.
  • First render blocks on shader compilation. F12 waits for the Rendered-variant pipelines to finish compiling, polling until they’re ready with a 10-minute hard cap before it times out. Pipelines are disk-cached, so later F12 frames in the same session only pay the poll overhead. See the first-run shader compilation note.
  • Empty scenes render transparent. If the scene has no Chisel objects, the frame comes out fully transparent.
  • No EEVEE/Cycles compositing. Only SDF objects are rendered. Regular meshes are not part of the F12 frame — convert with a proxy mesh or Convert to Mesh to render them in EEVEE or Cycles instead.

See also

  • Performance — the two-state viewport loop F12 bypasses
  • Quality — the step budget the still render uses at full strength
  • Matcap — the shading applied to the camera render
  • Baking — render texture maps instead of a camera frame