Background, fog & grid
Set the backdrop color, add atmospheric fog, and control the reference grid, the scene-wide environment settings.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
Beyond lighting, a few scene-wide settings shape the atmosphere. Find them in Settings ▸ Environment.
Sky presets
A row of one-click Sky buttons sits at the top of the group, because the environment color alone often looks like it does nothing: with Live lighting on, the procedural sky paints straight over it. Each preset sets both halves at once (the sky mode and the color), so the result is what the name says:
| Preset | What you get |
|---|---|
| Live sky | The procedural sun, moon and sky computed from the time of day. The default, and the one that covers the environment color. |
| Void | True black: sky off and environment light at zero, so nothing glows the backdrop grey. For product shots and starfields. |
| Deep blue | A saturated deep-blue backdrop that stays put at every hour. |
| Plain colour | Sky off, nothing else touched: the environment color below is exactly what visitors see. |
A hint under the row tells you which state you're in, so you always know whether the color picker below is doing anything.
The manual controls
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Environment color | The solid background color. (In Live lighting the procedural sky covers it; you'll see this color in Studio mode.) |
| Fog color | The tint of the fog. |
| Fog type | Linear (fades between a near and far distance) or Exponential (a density value). Fog adds depth and hides the horizon. |
| Fog near / Fog far | Linear only. The distance where the fog starts, and the distance where it has completely taken over. |
| Fog density | Exponential only. How fast the fog thickens with distance (0.001–0.5): there is no far plane, it just keeps building. |
All four reach your published page exactly as you set them here. (Until recently the published viewer quietly substituted its draw distance for Fog far and drew every scene's fog as linear, so if you once moved these sliders and the live page looked wrong, look again.)
The grid and the ground
A reference grid can be drawn at y ≈ 0 to help you judge scale and placement. It's an authoring aid, so it's off on a new scene and never drawn in the published view at all: the first thing you see is your scene, not scaffolding. Turn it on in three places, whichever is nearest: Settings ▸ Selection + Visual Feedback ▸ Show grid, Show Grid in the viewport right-click menu, or Show Grid in the command palette (Ctrl/⌘+K). A scene keeps the grid only if it actually saved that setting, so an older scene whose author never touched the toggle opens without one too. There's no solid ground plane by default either: if you want a real floor (to catch shadows or stand objects on), add a Plane primitive.
Reflections
Both lighting modes load a neutral studio HDRI as the scene's reflection environment, so metallic and glossy materials have something believable to reflect. In Studio mode its strength is the Environment intensity value; in Live mode it dims automatically at night.