Photoreal renders

Photoreal renders trace how light really bounces around your rooms, so you get soft shadows, light spilling through windows and gentle reflections. They run in your browser on your own graphics card: nothing is uploaded until the image is finished.

Before you start

• A browser with WebGL 2 and floating-point render targets. Current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on most computers have both. If yours doesn't, the dialog says so and standard renders still work.
• Frame the shot in 3D first. Turn on the Sun study for a specific date and time, or Night to light rooms with your lamps.

Steps

1. In 3D, choose Render, then Photoreal at the top of the dialog.
2. Pick a Resolution (Preview, HD, 4K or 8K) and an Aspect ratio.
3. Pick a Quality: Draft (64 samples), Good (256) or Best (1024). More samples means less grain and a longer wait.
4. Leave Smooth remaining noise on for a cleaner result. Turn on Transparent background to hide the sky and ground.
5. Choose Render photoreal. A live preview sharpens as samples add up; the progress bar shows samples done and an estimate of the time left. Cancel render stops at any point.
6. When it finishes, the PNG downloads and is saved to the project's Renders tab (with a subscription and cloud storage), pinned to the design version and camera you used.

How long does it take?

It depends entirely on your graphics card. A Draft HD image takes seconds on a gaming GPU and a minute or two on a typical laptop; Best at 4K or 8K can take a long time. 4K and 8K are rendered in tiles to stay within graphics memory, so keep the tab in front while it works.

Common problems

• "Photoreal isn't available on this device". Your browser or graphics driver lacks WebGL 2 or float render targets. Update the browser, turn on hardware acceleration, or use another computer.
• Stuck on "Preparing the path tracer". The first render compiles large graphics shaders; on slow or software graphics this can take a minute or more.
• The render stopped with a graphics error. The device ran out of graphics memory. Try a smaller size or Draft quality, and close other heavy tabs.