Bloom, reflections and other preview effects

Begin with Beauty#

Open Scene Settings and enable only the effects you need. Tune lighting and exposure first. Preview effects apply to Render Preview and snapshots, not to HDRi export. Start with subtle values and compare with the effect disabled.

Tone Mapping, Bloom, Lens Flare and Glare · all modes#

Tone Mapping provides ACES, AgX, Neutral, Reinhard, Cineon, Linear and None. Display Exposure is independent of Global Exposure. Contrast and saturation are display controls.

Bloom works from HDR highlights. Threshold selects which bright regions contribute, Soft Threshold softens that selection, Intensity controls strength and Radius changes the spread. Its slider gives finer movement near low values such as 0.1; use the number field for an exact value. Iterations and Power further shape the effect. Show Bloom Only helps inspect it.

Lens Flare adds highlight-derived ghosts and halo. Glare adds directional streaks. Both start disabled and have isolated views. Threshold, extent, softness and their optical controls affect the result. These are screen-space effects, not a physical lens simulation.

Chromatic Aberration, LUT and Vignette · Professional and Advance#

Chromatic Aberration separates color near image edges; begin with very little intensity. Vignette shapes edge darkening using strength, radius, softness and color.

LUT offers built-in looks or an imported 3D .cube lookup table. Adjust intensity and whether the background is affected. A LUT is a display transform, not an HDR color-space conversion or an OCIO configuration.

SSR, Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field · Advance#

SSR uses information visible on screen to approximate reflections. Tune intensity, distance/radius, thickness/tolerance, step count, falloff and roughness cutoff. More steps can cost frame time. It cannot reliably reflect off-screen or hidden geometry. Reflections use the surface’s linear base color and metalness, so gold reflections retain a gold tint while dielectrics use their index of refraction. Base-color, roughness and metalness maps participate in the reflection buffers. Diamond materials keep their own internal reflections and can appear in reflections on other surfaces. Roughness filtering remains approximate. SSR shares a single material-buffer render, traces at a configurable resolution, and accumulates samples while the scene is still. Optional feedback adds bounded screen-space bounce lighting; motion resets the accumulated samples. Fresnel reflectance controls both the added reflection and how much original lighting it replaces, limiting darkening on low-reflectance surfaces.

Ambient Occlusion approximates darkening where surfaces are close. Radius controls scale; intensity controls strength. Bias helps avoid self-darkening artifacts. Higher sample counts can reduce noise at a performance cost.

Depth of Field uses a target or manual focus distance, focus range, near/far blur and maximum blur. Use focus picking when available to choose a point on the model. It is a depth-based approximation and may show edge artifacts.

Diagnose and reset#

Use isolated views or the Render Passes menu, then return to Beauty. Reset icons restore each section; factory defaults are generated from the application's reset values.

Color controls#

Reflection color, vignette color and flare tint use the shared color picker. They stay solid; effect strength and display contrast remain separate controls.

Background display transform#

Tonemap background applies the selected tone mapper to visible background pixels (On by default). Disable it to preserve the background's display colors while tone mapping surfaces normally. Clip HDR background limits visible background radiance to 0–1 before bloom (Off by default). These controls do not alter the environment used to light materials or the HDRi export. Dynamic Ground is a scene surface and retains normal surface tone mapping. Transparent exports retain their alpha.

Reflection quality and performance#

SSR now shares a single normal/roughness/reflectance scene pass. Reflection Resolution defaults to 0.5: the ray trace runs at half width and height, with depth/normal-aware reconstruction. Choose 1 for thin detail or 0.25 to reduce ray work further. Ray Steps sets the trace budget; distance, thickness, normal bias, front-ray fade, jitter, roughness cutoff and edge fade control which hits are accepted.

Settled Samples refines static reflections over a bounded number of frames. Camera and scene changes discard previous samples instead of smearing old reflections across the image. A completed static result is reused. Intensity, saturation, contrast, gamma and shadow strength adjust the reflected light. Color Boost remains available.

Optional Bounce Feedback feeds settled reflected light into later screen-space samples. Bounce contrast, saturation and absorption shape that feedback; it is an artistic approximation and starts afresh after movement. It cannot reveal geometry hidden behind other objects or outside the viewport. Gemstones use their own internal optics but can appear in reflections on nearby metal. Preview images and animation use the same renderer; spatial AA can capture fewer reflection samples than a settled viewport. With Temporal AA, captures accumulate the selected Progressive Frames count.

Reflections with Temporal AA#

Temporal AA refreshes reflection samples with each camera jitter sample and resolves them with the displayed scene. Its progressive frame budget governs convergence, so settled SSR does not keep the preview rendering indefinitely. The background intensity and gradient affect only the backdrop; they do not replace the Light Stack or Gem Environment. Tone Mapping and LUT background masks include procedural gradients and templates. See scene background and Temporal AA.