Photo Mode
A photo is a path-traced still of your current view: soft shadows, real reflections, glass that bends light, and glowing surfaces that light the room around them. It comes out as a PNG.
Taking a photo
- Frame the view you want.
- Open Configure Scene ▸ Scene look and press Photo….
- Press Render photo.
The still sharpens while it renders. You can keep working: your view never moves, and nobody else in the session is affected. Press Stop at any time to keep the still so far.
When it is done:
- Download PNG saves the file.
- Save to scene shots files it in the Explorer under Scene shots ▸ the scene's name. It is an ordinary Library file: it is shared with the session like your other files, and Undo removes it again.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Samples | 1 to 2048 (default 256). More samples, less noise. |
| Time limit | 2 to 600 seconds (default 60). The render stops at whichever comes first. |
| Denoise | Smooths the noise that is left (on by default). |
| Size | Half, View (the size of your 3D view) or 2x (at most 4096 pixels). |
Headsets and phones
Path tracing is too heavy for a headset or a phone.
- With a PC in the same session, the PC renders your view and sends the PNG back. The person on the PC sees Rendering a photo for you… Stop. A photo asked of someone else is capped at 512 samples, 90 seconds and 2048 pixels.
- With no PC, you get the best normal still of the view and a plain not on this device.
- On a phone you can switch on Try here anyway. It is slow and warms the phone.
What a photo cannot show
A photo draws the scene's objects and lights, not everything the editor draws. The window lists this too, under What photos cannot show.
| In the scene | In a photo |
|---|---|
| PBR materials, glass, emissive surfaces, 3D text, scattered objects | Yes |
| Basic, Lambert, Phong and Toon materials | A matte material with the same colour and texture. Basic counts as self-lit. |
| Shader-graph materials | The object's base material. The graph's colours, patterns and movement are not drawn. |
| Your own GLSL shaders | Left out |
| Flat text, particles, lines, sprites | Left out |
| Scene look effects (bloom, grade, vignette …) | Not applied: the photo is the clean render with the scene's tone mapping and exposure |
| Water | A still, glassy surface |
| Hemisphere and ambient light | Replaced by sky light in the same colours |
For AI apps
An AI app takes a photo with run {action: "photo"} (samples, seconds, denoise, and
save: true to file it under Scene shots). It sees the result like a screenshot.