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Performance Panel

The Performance panel helps you balance quality and speed for volumetrics, clouds, and heavy effects. It is split into three tabs: Presets, Volumes, and Extras.

Where to Find It

  • Open the 3D Viewport N-panel.
  • Go to True-VFX -> TrueSKY 3.
  • Scroll below the Miscellaneous section to the Performance panel.

Panel Layout

  • Presets tab for global volume presets and marching modes.
  • Volumes tab for per-layer quality sliders and atmosphere controls.
  • Extras tab for viewport and render helpers.

Presets Tab

Use this tab for high-level quality tuning.

  • Volume Preset: Choose a baseline profile for clouds and atmosphere.
  • Steps Mode:
  • Fast Steps for performance during look-dev.
  • Accurate Steps for flying through volumes or horizon-heavy shots.
  • Quality Mode:
  • Fast increases effective step size (faster, softer).
  • Accurate reduces step size (slower, cleaner).
  • Fast Viewport: Doubles the viewport step size for quicker previews.
  • Volume Looks: Pick a contrast and bounce style for lighting inside volumes.

Quick preset strategy

Use Fast Steps + Fast Quality for blocking, then switch to Accurate for finals.

Volumes Tab

This tab exposes per-layer controls so you can fine-tune cost where it matters.

  • Volumes list: Shows Atmosphere plus each cloud layer.
  • Atmosphere Quality slider: Per-atmosphere quality override.
  • Cloud Quality sliders: Per-layer quality overrides in the list.
  • Altitude Weighting toggle: Lets higher cloud layers use slightly lower quality for speed.

Per-layer control

If one layer is the hero cloud, raise only its slider and leave others lower for faster renders.

Extras Tab

Useful helpers for viewport and render performance.

  • Viewport Render Region and Camera Render Region for targeted previews.
  • Pixel Size for faster viewport renders on high-resolution screens.
  • Tile Size for CPU-friendly final renders.

Typical Workflows

  • Fast look-dev: Presets tab -> Fast Steps, Fast Quality, Fast Viewport on.
  • Final quality: Presets tab -> Accurate Steps, Accurate Quality, then raise the hero layer slider in Volumes.
  • Shot-by-shot tuning: Keep a global preset and only tweak the per-layer sliders as needed.

Tips

  • Use Volumes to spend quality only where you need it.
  • If clouds are noisy in the viewport, switch to Fast Viewport rather than raising global quality.
  • For animation, test a short render after changing steps or quality modes.