Lighting Diagnostics and Render Pipeline
Lighting Diagnostics (bottom area) helps you understand lights and shadows: which lights are active, why a shadow is missing, how the shadow atlas is used. It can also edit your scene's lighting defaults. Render Pipeline (bottom area) checks a render graph JSON file and lists its passes. Open both from the View menu.
Lighting Diagnostics
Choosing what to inspect
| Viewport | Inspects | Temporary overrides |
|---|---|---|
| Scene View | Scene View | Yes |
| Model Preview | The Model Editor | Yes |
| Material Preview | The Material Editor preview | Yes |
| Play session (read only) | Your running game | No |
Temporary overrides affect only the chosen viewport and are never saved.
| Control | Action |
|---|---|
| PREVIEW LIGHTING | Model and Material previews: Preview rig (neutral lights) or Scene lighting (your scene's lights). |
| TEMPORARY SHADOW PRESET | Off, Performance, Balanced, Quality or Ultra, to compare quality levels. |
| DEBUG SHADING | Off, Visibility, Cascades or Light count. |
| Solo selected / show all | Shows only the selected light, or all lights again. |
| Light | Selects a light to show its details. |
Scene View reapplies your scene's real lighting after your next scene edit.
What it shows
The summary lists light counts, shadow maps drawn or reused, shadow atlas size and use, and CPU and GPU shadow time. The details list the selected light's status:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Ready | Shadows are working. |
| Shadows disabled | Shadows are off for this light or the scene. |
| Resident light limit | More shadowed lights than max_resident_lights allows. |
| Atlas full | No room in the shadow atlas; make it larger or lower shadow resolutions. |
| Refresh deferred | Waiting its turn to update this frame. |
| Preparation error | Something failed; the error is shown. |
The shadow atlas diagram shows where each light's shadow maps sit. Click a rectangle, or use the SHADOW MAP menu, to select a map. With the diagram focused, arrow keys and Home / End step through maps.
Scene defaults
These edit the lighting block of your scene file
(Scenes: lighting) as Undo steps:
| Control | Scene key |
|---|---|
| Scene illumination | lighting.enabled |
| Scene shadows | lighting.shadows.enabled |
| SHADOW FILTER QUALITY (Low, Medium, High) | lighting.shadows.filter |
| AUTHORED SHADOW PRESET (Performance, Balanced, Quality, Ultra) | lighting.shadows.preset |
| ATLAS WIDTH (power of two) | lighting.shadows.atlas_size |
| ATLAS HEIGHT (0 = square) | lighting.shadows.atlas_height |
| AMBIENT RED / GREEN / BLUE (linear) | lighting.ambient |
Individual lights are edited in Inspector.
Render Pipeline
| Control | Action |
|---|---|
| PIPELINE | Source document (the file you are editing) or Play session (the graph your running game uses). |
| Validate active graph | Checks the current document as a render graph, including unsaved changes. For Play session, refreshes. |
| Restart Play preview | Saves all documents and restarts Play with them. |
| PASS | Selects a pass. |
| Open shader source / Open caster source | Opens the pass's shader / shadow shader. |
A valid graph lists each pass with its mesh, shader, depth and lighting settings, inputs and outputs. An invalid graph shows the reason, also in Output under Render graph. Validation checks the file; it cannot promise the GPU will accept it.
Limits
- Render graphs built in code (C or BT) can be inspected but not edited.
- Applying graph changes without restarting Play is Not implemented.