Building fast scenes
The handful of habits — render quality, LOD, instancing, decimation, texture caps — that keep big scenes running smoothly.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
A few habits keep even ambitious scenes fast. Most are settings; all of them compound.
Let quality adapt
In Settings ▸ Viewport Feel, leave Render quality on Auto. It detects each visitor's device and serves a cheaper frame to phones and low-end machines (lower pixel ratio, shadows and antialiasing off) while giving capable machines the full treatment.
Use level-of-detail
Enable low-poly LOD so distant objects automatically swap to cheaper geometry. Set the switch distance to taste.
Keep models light
- Decimate heavy imported models, especially anything you place many times.
- When you generate fill objects, ask for the low tier.
- Repeated objects are instanced automatically (see Reuse parts to instance below) — each copy still carries its own triangles, so low-poly source models matter.
Reuse parts to instance a whole scene
Instancing is automatic, and it's the single biggest lever for large scenes. Any time the same model is placed two or more times, every copy collapses into one GPU batch — so your draw-call cost tracks the number of distinct models, not the number of copies. A forest of 500 trees built from a dozen shared parts still draws roughly like a dozen parts. It works the same in the editor and on the published site.
- Share the source. Duplicate an existing object, or place the same library / generated asset again — copies that point at the same model batch together. Two objects that merely look alike but were imported separately do not.
- Group freely. Batching looks at the model, not the outliner — identical parts nested inside different groups (say, the trunk and canopy blobs of every tree) still instance together across the whole scene.
- Vary each copy for free. Position, rotation, scale, and a per-copy tint all stay inside the one draw call, so a batch never has to look copy-pasted.
- One-offs aren't batched. A model placed a single time renders on its own — no penalty, just no saving. The win starts at the second copy.
Cap textures on mobile
For image-heavy scenes (think a big website import), the Max image textures setting limits how many pictures stay in GPU memory at once — the rest stream in and out as the camera moves. It's the single most important knob for keeping phones happy.