Shadows

Enable/disable shadows in the scene. Shadows make the scene more realistic but they can hurt the performance on low-end devices.

Ambient occlusion

Enable/disable ambient occlusion from the scene. Ambient occlusion is a rendering technique which modulates the amount of ambient light received by areas of the scene, depending on how exposed they are. This setting can significantly improve the realism of the scene but also hurt performance on low-end devices.

Bump amplitude

If the model contains materials including a bump map, this setting acts as a factor for the amplitude of the bump effect.

Ground plane

Enable/disable displaying a plane at the ground level of the scene (z=0).

Grid

Enable/disable displaying a grid on the ground plane at the ground level of the scene (z=0).

Default material color

Define the color used for any geometry that wasn't assigned a material in Grasshopper. This will typically be the color displayed if the definition includes Geometry, Mesh, Brep components or any component outputting geometry that have the Preview in Grasshopper turned on.

Point size

If the model contains visible points (Point objects in Grasshopper), they are displayed with small volumes centered on the points in the viewer. This setting lets you scale the volumes to a comfortable size, depending on the scale of the full model.

Parameter validation

This setting defines the behaviour of the parameter widget on the right of the viewer window. There are two modes of interaction with the parameters:

Validation OFF

Each change to a parameter results in an immediate update of the model according the new value of the parameter.

Validation ON

A parameter change does not trigger a change in the model immediately. Users can instead set the values of one or several parameters without updating the model. The parameter widget enters in the validation mode:

• The changed parameters turn blue, indicated that their value has changed from the current model state.
• Two buttons Apply and Cancel are added to the bottom of the widget. Clicking on Apply will send a request to update the model with all the changed parameter values. Clicking on Cancel will forget about the changes and restore the widget with the parameter values from the current model state.

The validation mode is particularly useful for models with long computation times. In that case, triggering a model update every time a parameter changes makes it difficult to iterate through different solutions of the model.