Geometry & 3D node
3D Scene
Renders meshes as real surfaces, with real depth — the node that makes geometry visible as more than points. Dive in and add Mesh children, cable a Geometry into each, and the scene comes out as an ordinary image that Canvas composites. The camera orbits and tilts around the origin; one directional light plus ambient does the shading. Depth and occlusion live inside this node and nowhere else. The Geometry output hands the WHOLE scene back out as one merged mesh, each child placed by its own transform — cable it into a Particle Collider and the world the camera sees is the world particles collide with. The DATA PASSES — Depth (camera distance over Depth Near..Far), Normals, Shadow Mask — come out as ordinary image ports: drive a depth-of-field, gate film grain by shadow, or feed them anywhere an image goes. A pass only renders while its cable exists.
Inputs
| Port | Type | Default |
|---|---|---|
| EnableOff clears the scene’s image rather than leaving the last frame up. | bool | true |
| Camera DistanceHow far the camera sits from the origin, in Grafit units. Nearer is a stronger perspective as well as a closer view. The camera always looks at the origin, so this is the zoom. | float | 3 |
| OrbitTurns the camera around the scene, in degrees. The scene does not move — you do. | float | 30 |
| TiltRaises or lowers the camera, in degrees. 90 looks straight down. | float | 20 |
| Light AngleWhere the light comes from, in degrees around the scene. Together with Light Height it aims one directional light — like the sun, parallel everywhere rather than radiating from a point. | float | -35 |
| Light HeightHow high the light sits, in degrees. 0 is level with the horizon, 90 is directly overhead. | float | 45 |
| Light ColorThe light’s colour, and its alpha is the intensity — so an LFO on alpha dims and brightens without changing the hue. | color | (1, 1, 1, 1) |
| AmbientFill light, so the unlit side is a surface rather than a silhouette. Slightly cooler below and brighter above, like a sky. 0 gives hard black shadows. | float | 0.15 |
| BackgroundWhat the scene clears to. Alpha 0 leaves it transparent, which is usually what you want — Canvas composites the result over whatever is beneath. | color | (0, 0, 0, 0) |
| Shadow QualityThe shadow map edge, in texels — the honest number. 512 is fast and soft-edged, 4096 is razor detail at four times the memory and fill of 2048. The point-light cube runs at half this, the soft-shadow blur at a quarter. | int | 2048 |
| Anti-AliasingThe beauty pass's MSAA: Off renders fastest with stepped silhouettes, 4× is the smooth default. Data passes are never multisampled — they are data. | int | 4 |
| Pass QualityThe DATA passes' resolution relative to the viewport: 1:1 is exact, 1:2 costs a quarter of the pixels, 1:4 a sixteenth. Masks and depth ramps rarely need the pixel — Half is the working choice; the beauty image is never affected. | int | 1 |
| AO RadiusHow far the occlusion looks for nearby geometry, in pass pixels — small for tight crease lines, large for soft ambient pooling. | float | 8 |
| AO StrengthHow dark the occlusion gets. 1 is natural; above it, graphic. | float | 1 |
| Depth NearWhere the Depth pass reads black: camera distance at which the image bottoms out. | float | 0 |
| Depth FarWhere the Depth pass reads white. Everything between Near and Far becomes the grey ramp a depth-of-field or fog filter feeds on. | float | 6 |
| CameraSee the scene through a Camera node. Connected, it replaces Orbit, Tilt and Camera Distance entirely; unplugged, the manual controls work exactly as before. One Camera can feed several systems at once, which is what keeps their views aligned. | structure | — |
Outputs
| Port | Type |
|---|---|
| Image | image |
| Width | float |
| Height | float |
| Mesh Count | int |
| Geometry | structure |
| Depth | image |
| Normals | image |
| Shadow Mask | image |
| Shadows | image |
| ID | image |
| Occlusion | image |
| Motion | image |
How It Works
3D Scene is the node that makes geometry visible as more than points. It is a container: dive in, add Mesh children, cable a Geometry into each, and the scene comes out as an ordinary image that Canvas composites. Depth and occlusion live inside this node and nowhere else.
Lighting is done by Light children — Directional, Point (with Range) and Spot (with a Cone Angle) — up to four at once, each with a gizmo that explains itself and grab handles that move and aim it while the ports follow. There are two shadow slots, first come first served, with an honest budget spoken out loud: a refused light wears a red ✕ on its gizmo, a light with Casts Shadows off wears an amber one. Softness is real penumbra (an exponential-variance map, blurred in exp space), not dithered grain.
You pick the price — Shadow Quality (512…4096 texels), Anti-Aliasing (Off / 2× / 4×) and Pass Quality (1:1, 1:2, 1:4) are dropdowns with the real numbers on them. And a scene where nothing changed re-renders nothing: a three-level fingerprint skip parks the frame, keeps the shadow maps when only the camera moved, and stands aside entirely for anything that must animate.
The scene hands over its data, not just its picture. Seven image outputs, each rendered only while a cable consumes it: Depth (camera distance over Depth Near…Far), Normals, Shadow Mask (razor-crisp cast shadows), Shadows (the same with the picture's own softness — a multiply-ready layer), ID (every mesh in its own flat colour, for masking), Occlusion (screen-space AO) and Motion (per-pixel screen velocity, reprojected through last frame's camera and each mesh's last placement).
The Geometry output hands the whole scene back out as one merged mesh, each child placed by its own transform — cable it into a Particle Collider and the world the camera sees is the world particles collide with.
Children include Mesh, Light, 3D Particles, 3D Paths and Plot 3D. A wildcard "+" accepts any cable and creates a matching Port node inside, bridged to the new input.
Use Cases
- Lit, shadowed 3D — The reason the geometry family exists.
- The unified world — Particles drawn inside the scene, occluded and lit by the same lights.
- Data passes for filters — Depth into Depth of Field and Fog, Shadow Mask into Film Grain, ID into a mask.
- A collider from the scene — The merged Geometry output back into a Particle Collider.
- Charts in space — Plot 3D as a child, orbited with an Interactive Camera.
Tips
- A pass only renders while its cable exists — connecting Depth is what turns the depth pass on, and disconnecting it is what turns it off.
- Two shadow slots is the budget. The gizmos tell you who has them; plan the scene around that rather than fighting it.
- Pass Quality 1:2 halves the cost of the data passes and is usually invisible after a filter.
- Use the "+" to get a Signal, a Gradient or a string across the container boundary without hand-made Port nodes. Older projects grow the "+" when they open.
- Depth Near and Far define the ramp the Depth pass writes — set them to bracket your scene or the ramp will be mostly empty.
- Casts Shadows on a Mesh says whether it blocks light; Catch Shadows says whether shadows may land on it. They are different questions.
Open 3D Scene in the interactive catalog →
3D Scene is one of 381 nodes in Grafit Pro.
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