Reference / Nodes

3D Scene

One node, but the heart of the 3D pipeline. scene3d collects every connected 3D node into a single render call and emits the result as a 2D texture that you can pipe into Post-FX or straight to the output.

The composer holds eight geometry slots (geo_1 through geo_8), four light slots, four particle slots and a camera slot. Wire the nodes you need into the slots; unconnected slots are simply skipped.

Without a connected camera, the renderer falls back to an arcball camera you can tumble inside the preview. Wire a camera3d in to lock the view down for playback.

Scene 3D

scene3d3D

Composer node. Resolves up to 8 geometries, 4 lights, 4 particle systems and a camera into a single rendered 2D texture.

Inputs
PortTypeDefaultRangeNotes
geo_1 … geo_8geometry,,Eight geometry input slots.
light_1 … light_4light,,Four light input slots.
particles_1 … particles_4particles,,Four particle-system slots.
cameracamera,,Optional. Falls back to an internal arcball camera when unwired.
Outputs
PortTypeDefaultRangeNotes
texturetexture,,

Internally, scene3d drives a deferred PBR renderer with G-buffer pass, IBL using any connected hdri environment, optional SSAO, optional MetalFX upscaling and a post-process stack of bloom, tone-map, fog and depth-of-field.

Render settings

The composer holds the following on its inspector. They're plain fields on the node, there's no separate render-settings node:

  • exposure, linear stop multiplier applied before tone-mapping. Default 1.0.
  • bloomEnabled, bloomThreshold, bloomIntensity, HDR bright-pass bloom. Threshold 1.0 means only values above white-point bloom.
  • ssaoEnabled, ssaoRadius, ssaoIntensity, screen-space AO darkens contact points. Off by default.
  • shadowBias, depth bias for the directional light's shadow map. Bump it up if you see shadow acne.
  • fogEnabled, fogColor, fogDensity, fogStart, exponential distance fog.
  • dofEnabled, dofFocalDistance, dofFocalRange, dofBlurStrength, depth-of-field bokeh blur.
  • metalFXEnabled, metalFXScaleFactor, Apple MetalFX temporal upscaling. Off by default; turn on for 4K-ish quality at 1080p G-buffer cost.

Pipeline order

Each frame, in order: modifiers (noiseDisplace3d, twist3d, wave3d, instancer3d) run as compute passes against the source geometry buffers. Then the directional light's shadow map renders. Then the G-buffer pass writes albedo, normals, roughness, metallic, depth and emission. The lighting pass resolves all light_N inputs against the G-buffer. IBL samples the connected hdri if any. SSAO modulates ambient. Particles render forward over the result. Then post-process: bloom, fog, DOF, exposure and tone-map.

Outputs

The single texture output gives you a rendered 2D image at the composer's resolution (defaults to 1920×1080). Wire it into Post-FX, into a blend to composite over a 2D backdrop, or directly into syphonOutput to send live.

scene3d is optional. Geometry, light and camera nodes can also wire directly into the Root's geo_N / light_N / camera ports for the same effect, Root renders implicitly with the same pipeline. Use scene3d when you want the rendered result as a texture rather than the final canvas.