3D Scene and Render Pass Preview

What it is for

Use this tool when you have a small 3D concept and want to inspect its lighting or geometry before making a larger image. It accepts a Form Studio project or a Render Desk recipe and produces a small SVG preview. The calculation is independent of MoonRay, drawing inspiration from its render-output workflow.

A recipe keeps the source solids, camera, material finishes and render settings together. You can download that recipe and continue locally in Kerfwise Render Desk, where more pixels and samples are available. Cabinet manufacturing projects must first be modelled as Form Studio solids.

Worked example

Choose the Terraced forms example. Leave width at 96 pixels, height at 72 and samples at two. Select Beauty and calculate. The result shows four stacked solids with direct lighting, sampled soft shadows and local ambient occlusion.

Change the pass to normals and calculate again. The colors now describe world-space surface directions instead of shaded materials. Horizontal tops share one normal color; vertical faces change with their orientation. Download both SVG previews to compare them, or open the editable recipe in Render Desk and change the camera.

To use your own model, paste its complete JSON into Form project or render recipe JSON. The source can be a saved .kerfwise-form.json or .kerfwise-render.json file. Width, height and samples in the tool override the recipe's image dimensions.

How to read the result

Beauty combines light and the material finish. Base color shows the source color without lighting. Normals encode world X/Y/Z directions as RGB. Depth is normalized to the current camera, with nearer surfaces brighter; it is not a millimetre distance map. Light visibility estimates the visible fraction of sampled light directions, including surface facing.

Object IDs use deterministic display colors in visible-object order. These are not Cryptomatte masks, and antialiased edges are mixtures of colors. The workload plan reports visible solids, triangles and pixel samples. The downloadable recipe contains the normalized source and settings.

Tips and common mistakes

Use small images to inspect lighting, then open Render Desk for the final PNG. More samples usually reduce sampling noise, but do not guarantee a particular quality or render time. A fixed recipe, pass and seed produces the same pixels.

Hidden solids are excluded. At most 4096 visible triangles are supported. API previews allow 32–128 pixels per side and 1–4 samples, with a ceiling of 65536 pixel samples. Inputs are sent to the server; the browser workspace renders locally. Disable the ground plane when you need a transparent cutout.

FAQ

Does this execute MoonRay?

No. This is an independently written concept renderer using direct light, short-range ambient occlusion and one reflection for metal. It does not import RDL/USD scenes or provide path tracing, EXR or glass materials.

How do I keep editing?

Download the recipe or follow Open in Kerfwise Render Desk. If the project is too large for a link, use the downloaded file. Keep the original Form Studio file for geometry editing.

Can an agent use it?

Yes. Use the JSON API or MCP tool kerfwise_scene_preview. Its direct input object contains project as JSON text, plus width, height, samples and pass. The browser and API share the same rendering engine.