3D Material Preview

The 3D Material Preview renders your material on a lit model through the native (Rust/wgpu) renderer, with image-based lighting, an analytic three-light rig, MSAA, and an ACES or AgX tonemap. MSAA runs at 4× where the adapter supports it and steps down to 2× or off where it does not, so a weak GPU gets a plainer image instead of a dead viewport. The viewport redraws only when something changes - camera, material, environment or size - so a preview you are not touching costs no GPU time.

While the renderer is starting the panel reads “Starting native renderer…”. A failed start retries a few times on its own first; if it still cannot come up, the panel shows “3D renderer stopped” with the failure text and a Restart Renderer button.

What the preview reads

The preview reads one PBR Output node and consumes nine channels: Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, AO, Height, Emissive, Opacity, Thickness.

In the Specular / Glossiness workflow, the Roughness slot reads the Glossiness input and the Metallic slot reads the Specular input. The panel’s labels do not change.
A wired input always renders. The channel’s on/off toggle on the PBR Output node only decides what an unwired channel does: on, it renders the node’s constant; off, it renders the channel’s neutral.
An unwired Normal always falls back to a flat surface normal; it has no constant value.
The Maps section’s per-map switch is separate, and it wins over both: a map switched off there renders its neutral no matter what is wired.
A whole material wired into the Material input - a Trim Sheet, a Material node, another PBR Output - supplies every channel you did not wire explicitly. A per-channel input stays more specific and keeps winning.
Clearcoat, Clearcoat Roughness and Opacity are read from the node as well. The shaded opacity is the node’s Opacity Value, when Use Opacity is on, multiplied by the Opacity map - so an alpha map thins the surface where it is dark and the node’s value scales the whole thing. Clearcoat is 0 until Use Clearcoat is on.
Thickness drives subsurface scattering: light bends through the surface toward the eye and wraps around the back, scaled by the map and by the environment behind the model. At 0 - the default - it scatters nothing.
With no PBR Output node in the graph at all, every Maps row is inert and the model renders as a neutral gray surface.

In the Metallic / Roughness workflow the dielectric specular level is fixed; nothing exposes it. Every other shading value the renderer gets is the one the PBR Output node holds, so the preview and an export of the same graph cannot drift apart.

Which material the preview shows

A project with several PBR Outputs previews the one you nominate. Select the node and press Visualize in 3D Preview in the Properties panel, or pick Visualize from its context menu; the button then reads “Visualized in 3D Preview”. The choice is saved with the project, not with the app, so reopening a multi-material file lands on the same material.

With no choice made, the preview takes a terminal PBR Output - one whose Material output feeds nothing - and falls back to the first one in the graph when every candidate feeds something. That rule is why a trim-sheet graph previews the sheet rather than whichever strip happened to be built first. Deleting the chosen node falls back the same way. See Multiple materials in one project.

Navigating the viewport

Action	Desktop	Touch
Orbit	Drag	One-finger drag
Zoom	Scroll wheel	Pinch
Pan	`Shift`+drag or middle-mouse drag	Two-finger drag

Dragging right turns the model right. Vertical orbit is clamped so the camera cannot pass over the poles. Camera distance ranges 0.5 to 7.0 and starts at 3.0; the pan target is clamped to ±2.5 on each axis. At the closest zoom you can push the camera through a volumetric shape, which is intentional.

Two keys work once you have clicked or tapped inside the viewport, which is what gives it keyboard focus:

Key	Result
`[` and `]`	Step back and forth through the maps this material has, wrapping through Final
`Tab`	Open or close the toolbar’s full strip

The toolbar sits in the bottom-left corner of the render, in the viewport and in the pop-out alike. At rest it fades to about 45% opacity a couple of seconds after you stop interacting, and comes back to full strength on hover.

Collapsed, it is four buttons: expand, Reset camera, Turntable, and Pop preview out.

Reset camera restores the default orbit angles, zoom, and pan target.
Turntable slowly rotates the environment and the key light together (about 0.35 rad/s, one lap in roughly 18 seconds) so reflections sweep across the material. The model itself does not spin. It is the same setting as the Lighting section’s Turntable toggle.

Expanded - the first button, or Tab - it becomes one wrapping strip: a chip per map this material has (starting with Final), an Exposure mini-slider, ACES / AgX, Turntable, Canvas, and a × to collapse it again. Every one of those is the same setting as its counterpart in the options sections below.

Canvas is “use as canvas background”: it draws a dedicated high-resolution material still (2048 px, matched to the canvas aspect, transparent backdrop, model centered) behind the node canvas. While it is on, the live viewport in the panel unmounts to avoid rendering the material twice, and a notice with a Show viewport here button takes its place. Turning it off clears the canvas background immediately.

Viewing one map at a time

Any channel the material actually has can be shown on the model instead of the shaded result - the map itself, wrapped around the geometry. Pick it from a Maps row, a toolbar chip, or [ / ].

Map views are unlit and unprocessed. Exposure, tonemapping and bloom are all skipped, so what you see is the authored value, not a lit interpretation of it.
Base Color and Emissive are shown re-encoded to match their source bytes, and Normal is shown as the raw tangent-space sample. Everything else is a straight grayscale readout of the channel.
While a map view is active the render is labeled “Viewing: <channel>” in its top-left corner, so a screenshot of it says what it is.
Only channels this material has are in the [ / ] cycle and in the toolbar’s chips. The Maps section lists all of them either way, with the missing ones dimmed.

Which map you are viewing is view state, not a setting. It is not saved with the project, does not survive a relaunch, and never reaches anything rendered off-screen: the 4K export, the canvas background and the project hub’s thumbnail always render Final. Nothing in this panel - neither map views nor the per-map switches - changes what Export Textures writes.

Popping the preview out

The toolbar’s last button fills the window with just the render: no options panel, no header, the toolbar still in its corner and a close button top right. The docked panel reads “Preview is popped out” while it is open, because there is only ever one live viewport - the pop-out’s.

Esc brings it back. If the toolbar’s full strip is open, Esc collapses that first and a second press closes the pop-out. The same button (now pointing the other way) and the close button both return it to the panel.

Export 4K Preview

Export 4K Preview renders the material at 4096 px through the native renderer and writes it as a PNG to a folder you pick. The button reads “Rendering 4K…” and is disabled while the render is in flight.

The still is framed, not screenshotted: it solves for a camera distance that fits the model and ignores the viewport’s zoom and pan, so a preview you left half off-screen still exports whole.
No background, the toggle beside the button, drops the backdrop and writes the model on transparency - a cutout for a sheet or a slide rather than a beauty shot over the environment. Off, the still keeps whatever the Environment section’s Backdrop is set to.
The file is named material_preview_4k.png, or material_preview_4k_cutout.png with No background on, so repeated exports to the same folder overwrite each other.
Success: “Exported 4K preview to <path>”. Failure: “4K preview export failed”. Canceling the folder picker exits silently.

Options sections

Six sections sit under the viewport: Model, Maps, Surface, Lighting, Environment, Display. All of them are collapsible, and which ones you left collapsed persists along with everything else.

Each header carries a Reset and, whenever anything inside it differs from its default, a small dot - so a collapsed section still tells you it has been touched. Pressing Reset restores that section only. Hold it, or right-click it, to get “reset all preview settings” behind a confirm; the imported model and the imported HDRI survive that, since they are assets with their own Remove and Studio actions.

Every numeric setting has both a slider and a directly typeable value field.

Model

Shape: Sphere, Cube, Rounded, Plane, Cylinder. Default Sphere. These are real tessellated meshes, not shader tricks. A sixth chip, Model, appears once the project has an imported model.
Import Model… / Replace Model… takes an .obj or .glb, parses it before storing anything (so a file the importer cannot read is reported rather than silently embedded), and embeds the file itself in the project. The toast reports the triangle count, or warns that the mesh has no UVs and the Model UV node will have nothing to bake. Remove drops it and returns to the sphere. The line underneath names the imported asset, or reads “No model imported - .obj or .glb, shown as authored”.
Subdivisions: 8 to 256, default 96. Segments along the primary axis; each shape maps it to its own topology. Higher values give displacement more geometry to work with, at a render-time cost. Disabled on an imported model, which is shown as authored.

The model here is the project’s, not the viewport’s: the Model UV node bakes whatever is selected in this section, and switching model or subdivisions re-bakes it.

Maps

One row per channel: the wide button on the left views that map in the viewport (see Viewing one map at a time), and the switch on the right hides that map from shading, so the material falls back to that channel’s neutral. Rows, in order: Final, Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, AO, Height, Emissive, Opacity, Thickness. Final has no switch.

Rows are never hidden. A channel this material has no source for is dimmed and inert, and a channel backed by the node’s constant rather than by a texture carries a small constant tag - so the list doubles as an inventory of what the material has got.

The per-map switches persist across launches; the row you are viewing does not.

Surface

Height

Displacement or Parallax. Displacement moves real vertices, so it changes the silhouette, but it can only resolve what the tessellation carries. Parallax resolves the same depth per pixel: it cannot change the silhouette, but it holds fine detail at any map resolution and costs nothing where the height field is flat.
Depth: 0.000 to 0.300, default 0.080. It powers both modes - at 0, neither does anything. Depth is scaled by the tiling, so it means the same thing in world terms whether the material tiles once or twenty times.
Contact Shadow: 0.00 to 1.00, default 0.35. Marches the height channel toward the key light, so bricks, ridges, stitches and gaps shadow themselves. It applies to the key light only, and costs nothing on a material with no height map.

Displaced geometry has its shading normal corrected to the shape it was moved into, so a displaced surface lights as real form rather than as a flat one wearing a normal map. In Parallax mode that correction is skipped, because the parallax offset already landed on the right texel.

Projection

Projection: Triplanar (default), Spherical, or Mesh UV.
UV Scale: 0.25 to 16.00, default 2.00.
Triplanar Sharpness: 1.0 to 16.0, default 4.0. Disabled unless the projection is Triplanar.

Lighting

A three-light analytic rig. You control the key light; fill and rim are derived from it.

Studio / Warm Key / Rim preset chips set the whole rig at once - direction, strength, softness, fill, rim and color. They are starting points, not modes: every control below stays live afterwards.
Light direction pad: drag to set the key light’s rotation and elevation together.
White / Warm / Cool chips, plus a Key Light Color picker (saturation/value square, hue bar, hex field). The default key color is a slightly warm white.
Key Strength: 0.00 to 10.00, default 2.50.
Key Rotation: 0.00 to 6.28, default 0.60.
Key Elevation: -1.40 to 1.40, default 0.70.
Key Softness: key-light angular radius, 0.00 (pin sharp) to 0.50 (soft box), default 0.10.
Fill Light: 0.00 to 2.00, default 0.60.
Rim Light: 0.00 to 2.00, default 0.80.
Turntable: the same setting as the toolbar’s.

Fill and rim are multipliers on the key, so Key Strength at 0 turns the whole rig off and leaves Environment Light as the only source.

Environment

Backdrop: Environment (the lit environment itself, default) or Flat (the interface’s surface color). A transparent backdrop also exists but is not a user option here: it is what the canvas-background still and the 4K cutout use.
Studio returns to the built-in procedural studio environment. Disabled when no HDRI is loaded; the readout then reads “Built-in studio environment”.
Import HDRI… loads a Radiance .hdr equirectangular file (the picker is filtered to .hdr). The environment is baked into a prefiltered specular cubemap, a diffuse irradiance cubemap, and a lookup table on the GPU. Success: “Environment loaded”. Failure: “Could not load HDRI - is it a Radiance .hdr?”. The chosen file’s path is remembered and reloaded on the next launch; the file name is shown under the buttons. A file that has since moved or stopped decoding drops back to the studio environment.
Environment Light: image-based lighting intensity and the brightness of the environment backdrop, 0.00 to 3.00, default 1.00.
Environment Rotation: environment yaw, 0.00 to 6.28, default 0.00.

Display

Tonemapper: ACES (default) or AgX. ACES is the familiar filmic fit. AgX desaturates hot colors far more gently, so a bright saturated emissive keeps its hue instead of racing to white.
Exposure: 0.25 to 4.00, default 1.00. Feeds the tonemapper.
Bloom Intensity: 0.00 to 2.00, default 0.00. How much of the thresholded highlights are added back before tonemapping, so bright highlights and emissives glow past their edges instead of stopping at them. At 0 - the default - the bloom passes are not recorded at all, so nothing pays for it.
Bloom Threshold: 0.00 to 4.00, default 1.00. The luminance a pixel has to clear to feed the bloom. Pixels are scaled by how far they clear it, so the glow keeps their hue.

Persistence

3D preview settings - camera orbit, zoom, pan target, shape, subdivisions, per-map switches, height and projection, lighting, environment, exposure, tonemapper, bloom, turntable state, which sections are collapsed, and the imported HDRI’s path - are saved globally, debounced so orbiting does not thrash the disk, and restored on the next launch. They are also saved inside each project file, and a project’s saved camera and render settings are applied when that project is opened.

Two things sit outside that. The imported model itself lives in the project archive - the settings only name it - so a model comes back with the project it was imported into, not with the app. And the map you are viewing is never saved at all, in either place.