Compare light and inspect render passes

Compare the light

Compare lights renders four small tiles with the same geometry, camera, materials and seed. Soft key, Side light, High key and Grazing light change direction, elevation, softness and ambient light. Use a rig to apply those settings to your scene, or download the comparison SVG.

A comparison is a visual aid. It does not choose a physically optimal light or measure real illumination. The shared Scene Light Rig Comparison tool exposes the same deterministic calculation through forms, JSON API and MCP.

Inspect a pass

Beauty combines direct light, sampled shadows, short-range ambient occlusion and one metal reflection. Base color shows source sRGB colors without illumination. Surface normals encode world surface directions as RGB.

Depth is normalized to the current camera and is not a distance measurement. Light visibility estimates sampled direct-light visibility, including surface facing. Object IDs are deterministic display colors in visible-object order, not Cryptomatte masks. Antialiased edges mix colors.

Choose a workload

Draft uses 320 by 240 pixels and two samples. Standard uses 480 by 360 and four samples. Fine uses 640 by 480 and sixteen samples. Custom settings allow up to 384000 pixels and six million pixel samples.

A fixed scene, seed and pass produce repeatable pixels. More samples usually reduce sampling noise; they do not guarantee a quality score. Actual render time depends on your device and scene. The Render Sampling Budget tool compares workload and a simple independent-sampling noise estimate.

Export clean results

Changing scene settings invalidates the old export until a fresh preview is rendered. PNG and SVG preserve the exact rendered image dimensions. Print / PDF opens a clean image in a new tab; allow the popup to print.

For transparent cutouts, enable Transparent background and turn off Ground plane. The ground remains visible whenever it is enabled.