--- title: "Render Settings Tab" canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/LAV/125273847/Render%20Settings%20Tab" format: markdown --- This page provides information about the Render settings tab in Chaos Vantage.  Overview The Render settings tab provides control over the rendering quality and optimizations, including such as GI, reflections, refractions, and noise threshold. The Render settings tab controls are grouped into Basic and Advanced options.  Rendering Noise threshold – Specifies the noise threshold that determines when to stop refining a pixel. Higher values allow more noise in the image, but the render is faster. Lower values help reduce the noise, but take more time to render. A value of 0.0 traces the entire image unconditionally. Firefly filter – Reduces fireflies (lone bright pixels) before applying any denoiser. Noise threshold – Specifies the noise threshold that determines when to stop refining a pixel. Higher values allow more noise in the image, but the render is faster. Lower values help reduce the noise, but take more time to render. A value of 0.0 traces the entire image unconditionally. Firefly filter – Reduces fireflies (lone bright pixels) before applying any denoiser. Weighted – Uses more accurate but slower weighted filtering. If there is visible darkening and flickering in an animated scene or while navigating in interactive mode, enabling Weighted could improve the result. Wide filter – The filter considers a wider area, but becomes slower.  Total bounces – Specifies a limit for reflection and refraction bounces. Animated noise pattern – Enables an animated noise pattern with a random seed to be used instead of a fixed one when rendering. Disabling Animated noise pattern causes repeated renders to be deterministic. Enable ray termination – When enabled, increases overall FPS of the scene but also increases sampling noise. Max term. prob. – Specifies a maximum termination probability value. If you decrease the value, less rays are terminated and FPS is lower, but there is less additional noise caused by the ray termination option. Min term. prob. – Specifies a minimum termination probability value. It is not recommended to change this value as it can lead to noise that never clears. DLSS full glass reflections – When using DLSS, this option enables full tracing of reflections for primary hits on refractive surfaces such as glass and water. This improves quality but affects performance. It does not affect performance or quality if there is no refractive surface or if DLSS is not used. sRGB-trained Gaussian splats – Disable only if the splats are trained in linear space instead of the typical sRGB space. Otherwise, the colors will be displayed incorrectly. Gaussian splat filtering – Affects the thickness of the rendered splats. Lower values increase splats' sharpness, while higher values make it blurrier. Lighting GI – Enables GI. You can specify the number of bounces for the traced GI rays. Reflective GI caustics – Specifies the method how accurate the indirect lighting reflects from specular objects(e.g. mirror, chrome, etc). Off – Disables calculations for indirect lighting reflecting from specular objects. Quick – Fast calculations for indirect lighting reflecting from specular objects that produce sufficient but less accurate results compared to Full mode. Full – Accurate calculations for indirect lighting reflecting from specular objects that produces proper reflective caustics with similar to V-Ray results. Light cache – Enables light cache. Reduces GI noise and improves speed of non-primary GI bounces. Direct light reservoir (re)sampling – Enables reservoir sampling for direct lighting of camera ray hits (secondary hits still use the light tree). Produces cleaner results but may cause slight darkening in specific areas. Applies only to non-infinite light sources. Resampling – Enables resampling of reservoir from the previous frame and the nearby pixels. Off – Resampling is off. Always – Provides best sampling but may slightly bias (darken) the result. First pass – Very helpful in interactive mode. GI – Enables GI. You can specify the number of bounces for the traced GI rays. Reflective GI caustics – Specifies the method how accurate the indirect lighting reflects from specular objects(e.g. mirror, chrome, etc). Off – Disables calculations for indirect lighting reflecting from specular objects. Quick – Fast calculations for indirect lighting reflecting from specular objects that produce sufficient but less accurate results compared to Full mode. Full – Accurate calculations for indirect lighting reflecting from specular objects that produces proper reflective caustics with similar to V-Ray results. Enable lights – Enables/disables all the lights in the scene. Environment importance sampling – Enables the environment importance sampling. This option aims to reduce the sampling noise on objects that are lit by the environment or have glossy reflections that see the environment. In most situations it is better to have Environment importance sampling enabled. You might want to disable this option only when using a solid color for the environment. This option is available only when Environment mode is set to Texture . Light cache – Enables light cache. Reduces GI noise and improves speed of non-primary GI bounces. LC cell size – Specifies the size of a single voxel, in scene units that is used for the Light cache calculations. Low values produce more accurate lighting but impact performance. LC sample limit – Specifies the maximum samples per pixel for refining the image. LC retrace threshold – Specifies the extent to which GI near corners are retraced instead of being read from the light cache. A value of 0.0 disables retracing. Enable lights tree – When enabled, uses the Light tree method to trace the lights rays. You can further set the number of samples. Direct light reservoir (re)sampling – Enables reservoir sampling for direct lighting of camera ray hits (secondary hits still use the light tree). Produces cleaner results but may cause slight darkening in specific areas. Applies only to non-infinite light sources. Resampling – Enables resampling of reservoir from the previous frame and the nearby pixels. Off – Resampling is off. Always – Provides best sampling but may slightly bias (darken) the result. First pass – Very helpful in interactive mode. Enable spatial importance – Direct light sampling for surfaces near the camera (up to ~70m) prioritizes light sources that could contribute more for that surface. Disable this option only if it causes unusual noise or 'boiling' artifacts. Spatial samples – More samples may stabilize the result a bit more in complex scenes, but reduce speed. If uncertain, use the default value of 1. Clamp secondary rays – Suppresses the contribution of very bright secondary(GI/reflection/refraction) rays, which may typically cause excessive noise (fireflies). When enabled, the scene may turn out to be darker than the actual correct result. Materials Opacity  – Determines how opacity is rendered. Off – Material opacity is not rendered, objects are fully opaque. Clip – The opacity texture is clipped to either fully opaque or fully transparent based on the mid-point value. Useful when there are many transparent surfaces one behind the other like leaves. Both clip and stochastic material opacity is rendered in clip mode. Stochastic – The surface is randomly shaded as either fully opaque or fully transparent for a correct average appearance. The material option from the vrscene/host application determines whether clip or stochastic mode is used. In all Opacity modes only bitmaps are supported for the opacity map. Reflections – Enables reflections. You can specify the number of bounces for the traced reflection rays. Coat – Enables rendering of clear coat in materials. Reflection bounces – Specifies the number of reflection depth. Higher values reduce performance. Refractions – Enables refractions. You can specify the number of bounces for the traced refraction rays. Sub-surface scattering – Enables sub-surface scattering. The slider sets the maximum number of random walk bounces while computing sub-surface scattering. Decals – Enables the rendering of decal objects. Round edges – Enables rendering of round edges. Opacity  – Determines how opacity is rendered. Off – Material opacity is not rendered, objects are fully opaque. Clip – The opacity texture is clipped to either fully opaque or fully transparent based on the mid-point value. Useful when there are many transparent surfaces one behind the other like leaves. Both clip and stochastic material opacity is rendered in clip mode. Stochastic – The surface is randomly shaded as either fully opaque or fully transparent for a correct average appearance. The material option from the vrscene/host application determines whether clip or stochastic mode is used. In all Opacity modes only bitmaps are supported for the opacity map. Reflections – Enables reflections. You can specify the number of bounces for the traced reflection rays. Coat – Enables rendering of clear coat in materials. Reflection bounces – Specifies the number of reflection depth. Higher values reduce performance. Refractions – Enables refractions. You can specify the number of bounces for the traced refraction rays. Min refl/refr glossiness – Specifies a minimum reflection and refraction glossiness threshold for the materials. High values result in a faster render. Sub-surface scattering – Enables sub-surface scattering. The slider sets the maximum number of random walk bounces while computing sub-surface scattering. Emission/Self-Illum – Enables self-illumination in materials. You can specify a global strength multiplier of the emission. Bump map – Enables rendering of bump maps in materials. When disabled and Dynamic textures  is enabled, reduces GPU memory consumption(scene dependent). Normal map – Enables rendering of normal maps in materials. When disabled and  Dynamic textures  is enabled, reduces GPU memory consumption(scene dependent). When Bump map and/or Normal map are disabled and Dynamic textures is enabled, GPU memory consumption (scene dependent) is reduced. Decals – Enables the rendering of decal objects.  Decals for glossy/GI – When disabled, decals are not calculated for glossy and GI rays. When enabled, decals are calculated for glossy and GI rays. This option is available when the Decals option is enabled. Round edges – Enables rendering of round edges. Textures Shading graph – When disabled, all materials are approximated for performance. When enabled, the original non-approximated materials are used. Dirt textures – When disabled, V-Ray Dirt textures are not evaluated. Instead, the unoccluded color is used directly. The slider sets the number of samples to take when calculating the V-Ray Dirt texture. Lower values render faster but produce a nosier result. Note that the per texture 'subdivs' option is ignored. Shading graph – When disabled, all materials are approximated for performance. When enabled, the original non-approximated materials are used. Shading graph for glossy/GI – When disabled, all materials are approximated for performance for glossy and GI rays. When enabled, the original non-approximated materials are used for glossy and GI rays. Dirt textures – When disabled, V-Ray Dirt textures are not evaluated. Instead, the unoccluded color is used directly. The slider sets the number of samples to take when calculating the V-Ray Dirt texture. Lower values render faster but produce a nosier result. Note that the per texture 'subdivs' option is ignored. Shading graph for normal maps – When disabled, all materials with normal maps are approximated for performance (i.e. remove triplanar UVs or multitexture inputs for normal maps). When enabled, the original non-approximated materials are used. Enable dynamic textures – When enabled, textures are downscaled based on where they are viewed from. This reduces GPU memory consumption (scene dependent). Texture size is updated if necessary on every scene movement. Texture LOD bias – Modifies what MIP level gets used when Enable dynamic textures is enabled. A value of 1 reduces the MIP level to half the texture width that would normally be used resulting in a more blurry texture but reducing memory. A value of -1 results in double MIP level texture resulting in sharper texture but potentially increasing memory consumption. Performance Boost playback performance – When enabled, tries to boost playback performance with a small number of animated instances and a large number of non-animated instances at the expense of slower rendering. In some cases it might result in lower playback FPS. The Experimental rollout and the Boost playback performance are available in Advanced mode only. Overlays Active pixels overlay – Displays an overlay that shows the pixels that are currently being rendered. Light pixels are the ones that are still being shaded and the dark ones have reached the set noise threshold. Active pixels overlay  – Displays an overlay that shows the pixels that are currently being rendered. Light pixels are the ones that are still being shaded and the dark ones have reached the set noise threshold. Transparency overlay  – Displays a checkerboard pattern overlay that shows pixels with alpha < 1.0 that will not be rendered when saving a . png file with alpha.