Rendering
You do not write rendering code. You drive the renderer with materials, lights, an environment, and post-process settings, all authored as assets and components. Every property below appears in the Details panel, so this page is a map of what controls what, not an exhaustive list.
Under the hood it is a clustered forward Vulkan renderer with a Slang shader pipeline, bindless resources, and GPU-driven culling. You never touch that directly.
Materials
Section titled “Materials”A material decides how a surface looks. You author it in the Material editor as a node graph that compiles to a shader, so you connect nodes rather than write shader code.
- A Material is the graph and its compiled shader.
- A Material Instance overrides a base material’s parameters (colors, numbers, textures) without recompiling. Use instances for variants.
Materials are physically based. The main outputs you connect are Base Color, Metallic, Roughness, Normal, Emissive, Ambient Occlusion, and Opacity. A material also has a type (lit surface, unlit, post-process, decal, UI) and a blend mode (opaque, masked, translucent, additive).
Assign a material through the mesh asset’s slots, or override it per entity with the mesh component’s Material Overrides. See Materials for the graph, instances, and performance best practices.
Lights
Section titled “Lights”| Light | Use for |
|---|---|
| Directional | The sun or moon. One main light for the whole scene, with cascaded shadows. |
| Point | An omnidirectional local light, like a bulb. |
| Spot | A cone, like a flashlight, with inner and outer angles. |
Lights are placed as components and oriented by the entity’s transform. Common properties are color, intensity (in lux), and attenuation. Directional and spot lights can also be tinted by color temperature in Kelvin, and any light can be made volumetric to scatter through fog.
Shadows
Section titled “Shadows”Shadows come from the lights that cast them. The directional light drives cascaded shadow maps, which keep nearby shadows crisp and distant shadows cheap. You tune the shadowed distance, softness, and bias on the light itself. Per mesh, the mesh component’s Cast Shadow and Receive Shadow flags control whether it participates.
Environment and sky
Section titled “Environment and sky”The Environment component sets the sky and the image-based lighting that fills your scene. Pick a sky mode:
- Solid Color, a flat background.
- Gradient, a sky gradient with a sun disc.
- Dynamic, a full atmosphere with time-of-day sun, stars, and a moon.
- HDRI, an imported panorama that also lights the scene.
The Sky Light component adds ambient fill so shadowed areas are not pure black. With an HDRI or Dynamic sky, lighting and reflections are baked automatically; the IBL Quality tier trades reflection sharpness against memory.
Post-processing
Section titled “Post-processing”Post-process settings live on the Camera component and on Post Process volumes, which blend their settings in when the camera enters them. Higher priority volumes win, so you can set a base look and override it per area.
What you can grade and add:
- Tone mapping (ACES, AGX, and variants) and exposure, with optional auto-exposure.
- Color grading: white balance, contrast, saturation, and shadow / midtone / highlight tint.
- Bloom, vignette, film grain, and chromatic aberration.
Atmosphere is its own component: Exponential Height Fog adds distance and height fog, and drives volumetric light shafts (god rays). Decal components project materials onto surfaces, for things like bullet holes and signage.
Quality settings
Section titled “Quality settings”Per-world render settings live in World Settings:
- Anti-aliasing: SMAA (a sharp post-process method) or MSAA. There is no TAA, so the image stays crisp without temporal blur.
- Variable Rate Shading trades shading precision for performance on supported GPUs. It is off by default.