Camera & View

Everything about how the scene looks on your screen — the camera lens, render mode, shadows, the grid and the environment — lives in one place: Configure Scene.

Opening Configure Scene

Click 🎛️ Configure Scene in the sidebar menu. It opens as a tab of the sidebar on the right (drag its tab to the left to keep it there) with these sections:

• Quality — the quality preset and the automatic-quality, shadow and model switches (your device only; see The Quality preset).
• Environment — lighting preset, exposure, sky image, saved presets (shared).
• Music — the shared background track and your local volume (see Music & Sound).
• View — render mode, camera lens, clip planes (your device only).
• Background and Fog (shared).

A dot appears next to the menu item while the panel is open; click it again to close.

Shared vs. this device

The Environment, Background and Fog settings replicate to everyone. The View section — render mode, camera lens and clip planes — is local to your device, so you can zoom, wireframe or dim shadows without changing what your peers see.

Render mode (View)

Three per-device render modes under Viewport — this device:

Mode	Look
Shaded	Plain lit shading.
Shaded + AO	Adds ambient occlusion — soft contact shadows in creases and corners (the default on a desktop; phones and tablets start in plain Shaded).
Wireframe	Shows every edge.

Z in the 3D view cycles them: Shaded → Shaded + AO → Wireframe (Shaded + AO is skipped when the scene's own look already sets ambient occlusion). Rebind it in Settings ▸ Shortcuts.

Ambient occlusion and wireframe are desktop-only and never shown to peers. AO detail follows your shadow-quality setting (below), so lowering shadow quality also lightens the AO cost.

These are SHADING modes — they are not how you see the scene's own look. A scene look renders for everyone in every mode except Wireframe, and you switch it off for yourself under Overrides — this device. If the scene sets its own ambient occlusion, Shaded + AO switches off and says so: the scene's setting is used instead of yours.

The Show light helpers toggle here draws icons for lights so you can see where they are — in the editor only; see Helpers hide in Play.

Camera objects

Besides your own view, a scene can hold cameras of its own — the shot a game starts from, a cutscene angle, a security monitor. Add one from right-click ▸ Add ▸ Camera ▸ Perspective (or Orthographic). It appears as a small camera marker you move and turn like any object; selecting it opens Properties ▸ Camera:

Row	What it does
Kind	Perspective or Orthographic
FOV (perspective)	field of view, 10–140°
Size (orthographic)	how much of the scene fits, 0.5–50
Near / Far	the clip planes
Framing	16:9 · 4:3 · 1:1 · 2.39:1 · free (follows the viewport)
Letterbox guide while previewing	bars that show the framing while you look through it
Preview	look through the camera. A banner says Previewing ‹camera›; its Control button lets you fly the camera with WASD and the mouse (its new pose is kept, as one undo step)
Set from view	move the camera to where your view is (and take its FOV)
Align view	fly your view to look through this camera (it stays your camera)
Capture	render one frame through this camera and download it as a PNG at the framing aspect
Preview window while selected	the picture-in-picture window (below), on by default
Show camera frustums — this device	draw every camera's viewing pyramid

The camera itself — including its Letterbox guide and Preview window while selected switches — is shared with everyone; previewing and the frustum lines are yours alone. The object's right-click menu has Preview camera and Set from current view too.

Picture-in-picture. While a camera is selected, a small window shows what it sees, live. ⤢ looks through it full screen, ✕ hides the window (the Preview window while selected row brings it back), and right-drag moves it. Since 1.34 it resizes too: drag the grip in its top-left corner (the picture keeps the camera's framing), or double-click the grip for the default size. The size is remembered.

A game uses cameras through the Set Active Camera node, the Game Start node's camera, Set Look for each camera's own look, and since 1.27 the Camera Rig node, which makes a camera follow or watch an object.

Camera lens

The default camera is a 40° field of view — a natural, product-viz look with real depth and little wide-angle distortion. You can change it under Camera lens:

Lens presets (labelled by their full-frame focal-length equivalent):

Preset	Feel
Wide (24 mm)	Roomy, exaggerated depth.
Classic (35 mm)	Reportage, slightly wide.
Natural (50 mm)	Close to how the eye sees.
Portrait (85 mm)	Compressed, telephoto.

Below the presets, the Camera FOV slider gives fine control (15°–120°).

Note

Your FOV is broadcast, but a peer only sees through it while they're spectating your view — during normal editing everyone keeps their own camera.

Clip planes

Also in View, the near/far clip planes control the depth range the camera renders (per-device):

• Near clip (0.01–2) — surfaces closer than this are cut away. Lower it if very close objects vanish.
• Far clip (from 10) — the far limit. It grows automatically to fit the scene, and the orbit zoom-out limit is paired to it so you can never dolly past the far plane and blank the scene.

Shadow quality

Shadow quality is a per-machine performance knob in the Settings dialog: Off · Low · Medium · High (default High). It caps every light's shadow-map size on your computer — Off disables shadows entirely. Per-light shadow settings still replicate; this only changes what your machine renders.

The grid

The floor grid can be toggled from the viewport right-click menu ▸ View ▸ Show/Hide grid, or the Show grid checkbox in Settings. Its fade distance scales with how far you've zoomed out, so it stays visible when you pull the camera way back. The grid hides itself in wireframe mode.

Environment presets

The Environment section sets the scene's lighting and sky. Pick a preset chip:

Preset	Look
Studio	Neutral grey studio (the default).
Daylight	Bright sky, strong sun, soft fog.
Sunset	Warm, low sun.
Night	Dim and cool.
Classic	The pre-lighting look with the rig off — bring your own lights.

Since 1.27 five more chips — Clear sky, Meadow, Sunrise, Starlight and Photo studio — use a real sky photo; see Sky images.

An Exposure slider tunes overall brightness. The lit presets add a sun that casts shadows, with a shadow-catcher disc under the scene so shadows land even on the infinite grid.

Environment is a shared, latest-wins setting — the most recent change wins for everyone. You can also save, export and import custom presets (stored locally), and adopt presets other peers have shared.

Below Environment, Background sets the clear color and Fog adds distance fog (color + near/far), both shared. A fog you set by hand keeps exactly the near and far you typed; a preset's fog still grows with a big scene.

Sky images (HDRI)

Since 1.27 a sky image — an HDRI, a 360° photo that keeps the real brightness of the sun and the sky — can be the scene's sky and its light. Every object picks up the image's colours and brightness, shiny objects reflect it, and water mirrors the real clouds. The scene's sun is placed where the photo's sun is, so shadows agree with the sky.

It lives in Configure Scene ▸ Environment ▸ Sky image (HDRI), under the preset chips and the Exposure slider. Click a card to switch to that sky; like every Environment setting, everyone in the session sees it.

Sky	What it looks like
Clear sky	open blue sky with clouds, haze on the horizon
Meadow	a sunny meadow with trees
Sunrise	a low warm sun and long shadows
Starlight	dusk under the stars
Photo studio	softbox lighting over a plain grey backdrop — light only; reflections show the studio

The five skies are also preset chips, and in VR they are in the radial menu's Scene ▸ Environment. All five are CC0 images from Poly Haven.

Row	What it does
Upload HDRI…	use your own equirectangular .hdr or .exr file (up to 25 MB; 1k–2k is plenty). It is added to the Explorer, your peers download it from you automatically, and it is saved inside .tpscene files and exports
Rotation	turns the sky; the sun and its shadows turn with it
Image light	how strongly the image lights objects (the sky itself is unchanged)
Show as sky	off keeps the image's light and reflections but shows the colour sky instead
Sky blur	softens the background — handy behind a product shot
Tone mapping	ACES Filmic (the default), AgX or Neutral: how the bright image is fitted to the screen
None (the first card)	back to the colour sky and the light rig

Exposure, above the cards, brightens or darkens the whole picture, and while a sky image shows it works on the desktop whatever else is on. Editing any of these turns the preset into Custom, like any other sky edit; Save preset keeps it.

A short tour points at the cards the first time you see them (Settings ▸ Interface ▸ Tours ▸ Reset all shows it again).

Sky image quality

How sharp the sky and its reflections are is a setting for this device only — Settings ▸ Scene ▸ Performance ▸ Sky image quality:

Choice	What it does
Auto (the default)	Low in a headset, in VR, or once the scene is too heavy for effects; Full otherwise
Full (1k)	prepares the image at 1024 px
Low (headset)	prepares it at 512 px — a quarter of the memory

The scene and your peers are unaffected.

Limits

• Only equirectangular images (twice as wide as they are tall); cube-map files are not supported. An .exr must be RGB or RGBA.
• Files over 25 MB are refused — your peers could not receive them.
• Someone on an app older than 1.27 in the same session sees the preset's flat colours instead of the image.
• A scene look with its own Tone mapping effect keeps its own curve.

Lights

A directional or spot light shines where it points. Turn it with the rotate gizmo — or type into the rotation rows — and the beam and its shadow follow, the way a light behaves in any 3D tool. Older scenes that aimed a spot at a saved point load aimed the same way.

Aim at, in the Properties panel's Light section, points the light once at a spot: type a world X / Y / Z, or press Pick in viewport and click a surface (Esc cancels). It writes the rotation, so the gizmo and the rows agree afterwards.

A directional light has a direction, not a distance. Its helper line reaches as far as Settings ▸ Scene ▸ Light helper length says — display only.

A light with an origin

Lights have an origin like any other object. Give a sun one — type it in the Transform section's Origin block, or press World 0 — and Rotate swings the light around that point instead of turning it in place: a sun on an orbit, in one gesture. Move still moves the light and carries its origin along.

Helpers hide in Play

Light helpers, camera frustums and camera markers are editor furniture. They disappear when Play starts, and camera previews and captures never show them, so a screenshot is the game and nothing else.

Show helpers in Play (debug) — on the viewport menu under View, and in Settings ▸ Controls — brings them back while you debug a scene, with an amber DEBUG · HELPERS chip in the corner so a capture cannot be mistaken for the real thing. It is your setting alone.