---
title: F12 Render
order: 7
---

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](../index.md#first-run-shader-compilation).
- **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](display.md#proxy-mesh) or [Convert to Mesh](../operations/convert.md) to render them in EEVEE or Cycles instead.

## See also

- [Performance](performance.md) — the two-state viewport loop F12 bypasses
- [Quality](quality.md) — the step budget the still render uses at full strength
- [Matcap](matcap.md) — the shading applied to the camera render
- [Baking](baking.md) — render texture maps instead of a camera frame